Sticky tape, cardboard, some wool strands for hair and a pencil to draw a face – this is how to make friends. I can make friends, hundreds of them – but I cannot keep them. 

Many turn out to discriminate against me and bully. Some don’t, they keep trying but eventually give up. I don’t get the relationship of friendship and there are no set rules.

Rule no. 1 

Come for a cup of tea every two weeks, for the next 15 years, and we will sit in the greenhouse and talk about different varieties of tomato plants. 

I could be everything that a friend needs to be – but something more important than friendship will get in the way. Something that, in essence, is not more important than friendship: a puzzle, a painting, a piece of music, a pre-occupation with words, an obsession with car engines – all these things sit, like limpets, around my skull. 

No!  – they are my skull.

 I juggle the need for companionship and friendship with the fear of failure. Based on experience and the, seeming, inevitable – I rip and tear before it breaks. 

In my world I believe that I can do anything, And, apart from three things, I can. The first thing that I cannot do – is to  experience the world as society demands that I should. Secondly, I cannot control the random sigh, laugh, yelp or sneeze of the person in the queue behind me. Thirdly, I cannot fly. 

I am in a box, listening to dust. 

I am in a room, softly feeling my own breath stroke my wrist.   

With the profound, multiple, overt and subtle discriminations of my every day – It is difficult to feel that I belong. Society appears to need me to fit in, even if it kills me.

I can be included, but only if I lie and say “I know that tree how you know that tree”.