Story-A-Day #155: Odd One

ODD ONE

She craved order in the world, a symmetrical balance that indicated that all was right. She appreciated beauty, so long as it was not abstract. There needed to be a sense of balance in order for her to feel right.

Some people felt that made her weird.

To her, being stuck in a long line of traffic was beautiful because there was order there. The cars would be perfectly spaced out in a neat little grid, each one maintaining its place and order within the system.

Architecture was beautiful, especially older building made out of brick. The perfectly planned synergy between the different components inevitably resulted in a beautiful structure capable of holding people, books, even religions.

Books she appreciated, the rigidly templated flow of information was appealing. Religion, however, was a little too abstract.

Grocery stores were always a weird place for her. Some sections, like the boxed and canned goods, were very pleasing and she could spend hours walking those aisles and admiring the attention to detail showcased by the staff; all the boxes and cans facing outward, just so.

Other sections could be chaos. There were still nice groupings, but in the produce section, all it took was one misplaced item to set her teeth to grinding. One purple onion in a sea of garlic could be devastating.

She knew that most people would find this appealing, a splash of colour to differentiate from the sea of tedium, but she was not one of those people.

And yet, in a sense the tableau was highly indicative of her personal foibles. She was that purple onion, the odd one out in a sea of familiarity.

She was attractive in a purely symmetrical sense. She didn’t dress oddly, but she would often dress in uniforms of a particular colour or pattern. Plaid was no good, and checkers had to be evenly and properly dispersed. Stripes had to be of uniform size and spacing.

She had been told countless times over the years that this made her weird, but in her mind, she was not the odd one at all. And she certainly wasn’t a purple onion, at least not on the outside. The tattered papery husk was incorrigible, but she had to admit that there was something pleasing about the symmetrically distributed orbits within, each layer revealing a new depth of sameness.

That didn’t make her odd though. It made her aware. More people should pursue balance; if they did, the world might be a better place.