Grate Expectations

Analyse this.

Fear and panic stopped me going to work today. Fear and panic have made me throw up breakfast and lunch. I have forgotten my diaphragm and am shallow breathing rather too rapidly.

I have had 32 years to get acquainted with myself and now I seem to be unravelling like an old cardigan. There is a great beast with its jaws wide open and i am stepping into the gaping maw in a pretty dress.

I will be chewed up and digested and emerge as someone I do not recognise and never wanted to be. People are going to own pieces of me. Expectations will increase.

It's amusing that the 'Labels for this post' suggestions are 'scooters, vacation, fall'.

My stomach has turned into a cramping maze of jagged points and my blood ooozes thickly and sluggishly through narrowed arteries. I have looked all morning but I can't find myself. In the mirror this morning someone who looks like me gazed back with a stranger's eyes.

People keep wanting me to crackle like sparklers at a party and I'm tired. I wish to be cool and quiet and grey. 'Sliding Doors' and its various universes is playing on repeat reel in my short-circuiting brain.

My parents are worried. They have doubts. This is not helping matters. I have always trusted their judgement implicitly.

I have a desperate urge to remove the white-gold band of ownership, sell it and volunteer on the Sea Shepherd for the next 12 months. I wish it would all go away, I wish to start again with a new pattern.

It's not "How exciting!", it's not a time of joy and delicious anticipation. The pieces of this puzzle just refuse to fit. Maybe some of them are from a different puzzle. What and where is the other puzzle? Should I be doing that one?

I keep matching 'Bride and Debride' in my mind as synonyms.

I have analysed the elements of this painting and they all seem to fit. There's just something wrong that I can't place. I could just whitewash the whole thing and start again. I could store it in a dark room somewhere and try looking again at a later date. This option screams 'Dorian Grey'.

You know what I'm doing tonight? -comforting a friend whose marriage has just ended.