Apprehension

I stood behind a chair which you had recently vacated. I had the intention of sitting there to write to you: a letter of such precision and finality, that it would inescapably show what it meant for me to be sitting in a chair still warm from you.

But the longer I stood behind the chair, the more formidable it became, and the more I became just a figure standing behind a chair, anticipating words: and there were so very many to choose from – they needed to be tamed. They scrawled in all the wrong directions, got up my back and in my nose and stung my eyes and began to perfectly unravel me.

And with mounting despair, I had to acknowledge that what I amounted to was totally illegible and not repeatable: something you would mark in the margins with a scratchy red pen as ‘too verbose’, or ‘unclear’, or if you were in an uncharitable mood: non sequitur mixed metaphor split infinitive.

It occurred to me that I have wasted too much time thinking before saying what it is I mean. And what it is I mean, I could hardly say, but that I’m going mad from meanings.

White knuckled, I watch the chair tip backwards. And nobody – nobody – falls out.