022. Crowded

There’s always something surreal about being in a crowded space. Being able to look into a group of people and see so many intimate secrets they don’t know are there for the rest of the world. It’s in their bodies, the way they walk through a crowd. Hints of early onset arthritis, heart trouble, cancer, abuse, rage, pregnancy, infidelity, illness, fear, hope, and a million other things. It makes her ache when she actually pays attention. All those behaviors, bodies, habitats begging to be seen and understood, if only once. It’s a good thing she has headphones, or she’d drown.

026. Run

Elenore really hates it when she has to run. It’s because something is chasing her or she has to charge in like she actually knows how to save the day. Which, okay, she knows how to fight for something good in the middle of a shit storm, but she damned well knows she isn’t a hero. Either way, it takes a type of physical effort and a mindset that really sets her on edge. She feels small, weak, fragile, and fuck anyone who puts her in that position. She isn’t any of that. She’s a planer, a builder, a strategist.

011. Food

She has food issues just like she has people issues. Being able to see a person and see them as their parts or animal nature tends to screw up relationships or her thought processes in romantic moments. Likewise, finding a bit of gristle in a steak that means the farmer was using old vaccination methods tends to ruin an expensive chunk of meat. Realizing that tomatoes in a salad appear to have come from a region that had had groundwater contamination issues tends to kill hunger pretty quickly. Heavily processed foods at least offer a little bit of a buffer.

016. Fear

It’s like an illness with the way it spreads through a group. Changing people and redirecting normal healthy adaptive responses to those people want to pretend they don’t have. Most people have a normal kind of insulation against it. A healthy ability to filter out other people that Elenore has had to fight to even begin to learn. Slight flickers in other people, and her pulse is all set to race with a huge dump of adrenaline in her blood stream. Throwing all her reactions to everything out of whack. Anger is similar, but fear is always so much worse.