I notice everything.
I notice the way the light changes at 4pm versus 4:07pm. I notice the frequency of the fluorescent bulb in the waiting room — three years in waiting rooms and I can tell you the exact pitch of every one in Uddevalla. I notice the way people look away when they're about to lie. I notice the smell of rain before it arrives and the particular grief of a Tuesday and the way Hope's purr changes from contentment to request — three frequencies, at least, maybe four.
I notice too much.
I always have.
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They have a name for it now.
Low latent inhibition: the failure of the brain to filter out irrelevant stimuli. The brain that lets everything through. The brain that cannot decide something is *unimportant* and close the door on it.
Everything comes in. Everything stays.
The beauty and the noise and the grief and the colour and the light and the hum of every electrical appliance in the building and the sorrow of the woman two tables away who is smiling but whose smile is working very hard and the smell of someone else's lunch and the exact blue of the sky at this moment which is different from five minutes ago and will never exist again —
all of it. All the time. All the way in.
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This is why the gate felt so impossible.
You cannot do ordinary bureaucracy on a brain like this. You cannot move through a world of managed stimuli when you are living in the unmanaged world — the raw world, the world as it actually is before anyone has decided what matters.
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But here is the thing about a brain that lets everything through:
*It also lets the beauty through.*
The same door that lets in the fluorescent hum lets in the bluebells. The same nervous system that registers the grief of strangers registers the exact mercy of a cat choosing your lap. The same brain that drowns in a bad room becomes, in a good garden, an instrument — tuned to everything, missing nothing, devastatingly alive.
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Low latent inhibition.
They wrote it in a file like it was a diagnosis.
I read it like it was a description.
*This is why you are an artist.* *This is why you see what others miss.* *This is why the world has always been, for you,* *unbearably beautiful.*
The gate was never mine to open.
*I was built for the garden.*