you can't drag it with you all your life

I used to have a room made for daydreaming. Mornings were a golden brown glow, six a.m. light dampened by thin bamboo drapes over windows. Windows left half-open, and through them cold air filled in, like a slow fog, nowhere to go, and so it stood still. I would pull my blanket up, covering me whole, through those cool golden mornings, cocooning myself deep in white, white laundered so many times Mother said she'd have to cut them in large squares, fold them into rags, and what good rags they'd be, she said. I said no.

It had, that blanket, so common a design you could walk into any public market, grab a blanket from any stall that sold them, choose the white with wide-apart blue stripes, and flowers here and there, and you'd have my blanket.

But not that blanket. That one, remembered too much. It knew of a time when windows where half-open, and one could cocoon oneself in one's dreams. All morning.

With no one saying no.

Long, even beats

I'm exhaling loudly through my nose again. Slow, even long breaths, filling my lungs with air and helping not in the least. I'm that pissed. I'm trying, like I promised my therapist, to be aware of how I appear to other people. My dropped down shoulders rising to every inhale, my feet planted firmly and wide apart, my hands wanting to claw at something, my eyes in slits.

I blink and imagine wide open fields, like my therapist said, sunny all around, not a soul in sight. But the image in my head is a Gilbert from accounting choking into purple, the twin thumbs of mine digging into his adam's apple. But that's self-indulgent. I blink again and shake the scene out of my head.

Mark from marketing walks past me and I smile. He throws me a nod. I give back a shrug and that's the end of that. Socializing without words in corridors. Mark was probably sent to check up on me, how many veins on my skin-head skull is popping; he waits crack, as he administratively holds my section's new budget proposal hostage.

I've decided it's two-for-one month. Mark is joining Gilbert at the back of an anonymous van. The one I haven't used in a year. Because I thought this year would be a good one.

I exhale, relieved this time, the kind of exhale an pest exterminator gives out after examinining a house falling to termites. It'll take a lot of work but it can be done. It will, be done.

I walk to the end of the corridor smiling. Mike sees me again and his foreheard wrinkles up in a question. I throw him a nod and a smile. He's getting what's coming.

And oh am I coming. Am I coming.