(Un)Familiar

I remember the first time I learned that people died. The first time that I considered how our skin yielded to the ravages of time, and our eyes popped from our skulls to be devoured by small maggots and all manner of tiny things with many legs. I was sat on the floor, tucked beneath the ironing board, as my mother flattened the creases from clothes in a compassionate act of steam and warmth, placing them eventually, neatly folded, on the white leather sofa. In the years which would follow, the sofa would become brown and the woman conducting the ironing would change, but this had very little to do with death in the literal sense. More to the point and perhaps more disturbingly, I would also became too large to fit underneath the ironing board and would spend most of my time instead sneaking crisps into the pocket of my dressing gown, so that I could eat them in my bedroom without fear of judgement, or indeed fear of human interaction.