While all things seemed perfect, he couldn’t help but feel like a monster. Nothing in his demeanor or countenance would betray it. Even his thoughts were normal, or well above normal. Everything was smooth and polished, like a rock in a stream. But he felt more like a clawed crustacean, living in the eddy of that rock, collecting bits of stray organic scraps that fell into the eddy. Like a crawdad, a crayfish, a mudbug. And his natural instinct to back away quickly from anything that seemed troubling or able to disrupt his fragile existence did not help to dispel that perception. And so he went about his days, smiling and working hard to be exactly perfect, with just enough flaws to appear normal. It seemed important to occupy this little eddy of calm and temperance, and not stray out in the wildly moving stream of events flowing all about him.
It’s the principle of the thing, after all.