Cold Tea
The day began with a bit of a normal, deceptive shimmer of competence. I had the tea steeping and a mental itinerary that resembled a blueprint for success.
But then came the notification. A missed call, followed by a voice message that sat in my inbox for a couple of hours. By the time I listened to it, the gates of some minor, personal hell had been kicked off their hinges.
When all hell breaks loose in a concrete sense, it is rarely a slow burn. Usually, it's an instantaneous hijacking of the nervous system.
The tea turns cold on the counter, forgotten, as the brain enters a state of high-alert static, and the internal pressure mounts until I feel like a browser with forty-seven tabs open; three of them are playing loud, unidentifiable music, and the "close" button has vanished. It’s the visceral realization that the day has officially outpaced me, and I am now just a passenger in a vehicle headed directly into a hedge.
There is a specific, frantic psychology to this state, in that something bad has happened, fundamentally outside the purview of my control, and yet I notice and play myself as the character gripped by the manic need to fix it immediately.
Part of the reason being while I am pacing the floor and trying to negotiate with entropy, my practical self tends to treat the crisis like a math problem that can be solved if I just stare at it hard enough, ignoring the fact that the variables are ghost-like and shifting.
It’s a vibrating kind of irritability that sometimes spills over into viewing every minor request from the outside world via the lens of a personal manifesto written against one’s peace.
Anyways, when the concrete reality of this collapse sets in, usually the first instinct is to fight the tide, as in I want to work harder and do anything humanly possible to solve this chaos of sorts.
But I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t punch the ocean into submission, so to speak. Surrendering isn’t much of an option, at least in the traditional sense of the term, you have to keep the attitude for survival, even if it feels like retreating.
Looking ahead is the hardest part when the current moment seems like it's vibrating with failure. The sun will, unfortunately, come up tomorrow, demanding a rematch.
I think I better start treating these days similar to a fever, have to let them run their course. Tonight, I’ll find something cold to drink and something a bit mindless to watch and will accept that today, the universe won a lopsided victory.
And hopefully, tomorrow, it’s a day where the gates stay firmly shut.
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