Impatient tapping.

There are times when everything suddenly seems to shush. When everything around you seems to slow down, when voices become an incoherent dull thud in the background. It’s the same way when a tape gets stuck in the recorder and the singer’s voice becomes distorted in to a meaningless stretched jumble. And you can’t yank out the tape because it would damage it. And you can’t bring the slowed down world around you back to its original pace. There’s a scream that seems to pierce through the sudden lull but nothing changes. The scream’s silent. It’s in you, and you know you are screaming on and on, your throat aches but no one seems to hear it. The background din seems to go on, unconcerned. While you scream.

There are times when you feel that you are teetering over an edge. Not just one edge, with one fall, one danger. When you’re on the brink of something big and you just don’t know what it is. And you probably have an inkling of it, but it’s too frightening to acknowledge. Sometimes you think about it and can’t decide what it is. It seems to elude you, leaving only a sense of deep dissatisfaction and unease behind. Sometimes you forget it, when you’re laughing at a joke, or listening to something. Sometimes, in sudden moments, it comes back to you. And every time, it hits hard. Sometimes you stagger, sometimes you feel angrily frustrated. But it ever seems to loom, just out of reach, just a few paces away. In your restless mind, it almost assumes the sure solemnity of a cataclysm.

You can’t decide, you want to, so bad. Kicking things doesn’t help, frustration mounts. While you scream.