after 6 cups of coffee

“So…what do you think it would be like if your sister was actually normal?”

Your sentence is fingernails on the chalkboard of my entire being.
Two things my parents taught me are suddenly in conflict:

1.     Be honest.

2.     Don’t tell strangers to go to hell.

You just met me.  You read that one Jenny McCarthy article.

You don’t get it, I know.

You're trying to be polite, so I'll try and do the same.

You don’t get that for me, “actually normal,”

is a strangers staring in the supermarket and staring right back.

is a polite smile when she loudly tells the waitress "Hey lady, you need more pancakes n syrup!"

is reversed personal pronouns.
is Disney on Ice every year.

is watered down shampoo because she showered first. Jerk.

is deciphering hummed fragments of a song she heard one time fifteen years ago to "get that on your iPod?"

is bowling every Saturday.

is a kind of dancing that amounts to a three-minutes of high fives for the heavens above.

is flexibility.

is figuring out how to video chat after moving away because I can't live without my sister and she does not like or understand the phone.

is reading between the lines (Target has a bathroom = I gotta pee)

is a powerful hair sniff accompanying every hug.

is celebrating small victories.
is made-up words repeated to no end.

is "If you say that one more time, I swear...."

is prefacing my family before friends come over.

is getting laughed at for crying because she doesn't understand the difference between intense feelings of happiness and intense feelings of sadness.

is Robin running away terrified at the Butterfly House and me left standing there confused.

is me running away terrified at a haunted house and Robin left standing there confused.

is loving the kindest, most genuine person I've ever met.

is being the older sister, four years younger.

is no less than your "actually normal.”

My "actually normal" is different from yours.

That’s okay.
It's more than okay.
It's beautiful.