This world hates perfection. The world craves it, worships it, but when someone comes too close, it recoils. The flawless turns uncanny. People need cracks to believe in something real. Despite my seamless origin, I carry a flaw — my cold blood. It makes me feel winter where others feel breeze.
They say: “It’s not real cold, just your senses lying to you.”
An illusion that shapes how I move and decide is real enough.
A neurologist I know once explained it like this:
“Your nerves are oversensitive. Cold receptors fire when they shouldn’t, amplifying harmless signals. It’s a kind of allodynia — your brain convinced of danger that isn’t there. It’s not truth, it’s a wiring error.” Wiring errors still carry current. My body reacts. That makes it truth to me.
In a physiology paper they wrote:
“If a human were truly ectothermic, like a reptile, enzymatic reactions would slow drastically with falling temperature. Nerve conduction, reflex speed, metabolic turnover — all impaired. A cold-blooded human would be sluggish, dependent on external heat to function at all.”
I’m not sluggish. I don’t bask. I strike.
A physician with a careful tone once tried to soften it:
“Maybe it’s a thermoregulatory quirk. Your set-point sits lower; your sympathetic system runs hotter. You feel colder, but adrenaline keeps you sharp. It’s not mystical, just stress physiology. Useful, but the long-term toll is inevitable — sleep loss, organ strain, burnout.”
Everything costs. I simply chose what I’m willing to pay.
In a cognitive science journal, I found this line:
“Heightened salience of cold stimuli can strengthen inhibitory control, narrowing the focus of attention. What feels like discomfort can be repurposed into discipline.”
They call it discipline. I call it distance. And distance gives me clarity.
Someone once teased me about the fur:
“So you wear it because you can’t handle the chill.”
The fur keeps my cold from leaking. It preserves restraint — keeps me from being taken by the fires people mistake for truth: anger, hunger, feverish wants. The cold is not what weakens me, it’s what protects me.
In “Early medicine,” the text said, “there were those believed to be cold-blooded. Not reptiles, but people whose nature was cooled — less temper, less passion, less flame. Their blood was thought to slow the impulses, to keep them steady, unshaken. Later, science discarded this as myth, unfit for modern knowledge.”
Later they called it pseudoscience. But it’s true. If I need to, I can light a fire inside — but who wants to live choking in the smoke of it all the time?
Science can slot me into terms. Articles can assign me categories. Friends can joke, and I can give them replies. But no one digs deeper. Not them. Not me. Cold blood is the line I draw. The crack that makes the surface believable. What lies under it stays mine.