emotions//joshler

normality

Normality.

What an ugly word.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of words in the dictionary, Josh hated that word the most. The idea of something being normal, the simplicity of it felt suffocating. Normality was ugly, and Josh hated it. He wanted adventure, excitement, something to change. He wanted out off this small life and his small town and the closemindedness of it all that was just so outrageously normal.

This was all pure irony, of course, because if there was anyone who wasn't normal in Josh's Midwestern town, it was him.

He was the very definition of abnormal, a boy born with a condition that, scientifically speaking, simply couldn't be possible.

Josh had kept the full extent hidden from everyone. No one knew exactly what he could do, not his parents, nor his teachers or even his best friends in school. No one knew, and no one could know. It was as simple as that.

At age seven he had been taken to the local psychiatrist on account of his "strangely perceptive nature." His parents had been concerned for a long time. The way he always seemed to know what was on their mind scared them, and they had worried their son had some mental illness. Not that the local doctor was any form of competent, but it had provided them with some sense of security when he had given a very confused Josh back to them, blandly stating that he was just an unusually emotionally sensitive boy, and that there really was no need to be concerned.

Since then, the matter hadn't resurfaced. His parents had grown to accept Josh's acute emotional intelligence, and even appreciate when the days got harder. He wowed his friends at school with his telekinesis-like abilities and irritated teachers with his frightening accuracy in his pointed comments about their social life. People saw him as completely amazing, like an animal in the zoo, on parade to be stared at and do tricks.

It didn't bother Josh, the comments and the slight apprehension in the eyes of people he talked to. If they wanted to be afraid, that was their choice. If they wanted to see him as different, that was their business.

But Josh wasn't abnormal. His condition was something he'd had his whole life, had grown up with and never seen anything particularly odd about it. It was a part of him, just like his eye colour or hair. To Josh, his abnormality was just another mundane thing in his mundane life.

It was the emotions, see.

The colours they gave off. It was all to do with perception. If you looked hard enough, you'd find them too, swirling around like clouds, shifting and changing as life progressed at its typical snail pace. They were there, but only Josh bothered to look for them.

The colours. The clouds. The emotions.

They were all there, a gateway into a stranger's mind. The deep red, fast-swirling clouds could mean anything from a shit day at work to an annoying lab partner. Pale blue could mean melancholy, but it could also mean calm, depending on the tint of colour. Pink was love. Purple was generally pride or arrogance. Grey was sadness. Yellow was carefree. Blood red was for lust. Green was for jealousy. The colours, the rainbow, they all meant something.

They were just a window into the mind.

And Josh was the only one that looked.

//yEET IM EXCITED FOR THIS ONE//