A Billion Burning Dreams

The Cure Mentality I was born a broken Tinkertoy. The pieces of my mind configured to not fit quite right. Great gaps separating synapses, whose dendrites reached like desperate fingers for siblings falling away. Those hands held secrets, the neurons whispering: I am not broken. Doctors tried to fix me, patch up the perfectness of my disorder. Fed me medications

that damned the divides between my skittering nerves, but they only served to flood the majesty of my Grand Can yons, because my mind wasn’t falling away — it was flying. When you strip away the bells and whistles of our brains — rearrange the cogs and play with the knobs — you’ll discover the world has changed. The mind is just a filter through which reality is fed. What you see is only one of many worlds I feel inside my head. This moment has a texture. Every sound has a voice. I can’t read the furrows of your face, because my brain can’t filter out the noise. Your social cues confuse me, but do you know all the names of the presidents’ wives? I can recite to you the history of music

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