Silent footfalls in my head

Have you ever had the experience of grabbing a stray thought by the neck and wringing it till it turned tail and ran? It’s happened to me a few times. But the problem with that is sometimes it refuses to go away quietly. It plays dead for a while and then when I’m not looking it skulks away and settles down in the corner of my mind. Very annoying because then I get conflicting emotions. On the one hand with the thought out of the way I open the door to other thoughts that have been lurking around and desperately raising their heads to see if I spot them and then without any warning I find that it has squeezed itself back in the corner, spreading itself thin so that I miss its contours.

Sometimes while watching TV I notice, from the corner of my eyes, a grey, formless thing slipping away and I know immediately that it is one of those stray thoughts that has not managed to catch my attention. I let it go. Fade away into nothingness. What does one stray thought matter from an ocean of squirming thoughts that are piled high inside my head.

Over the years I’ve gathered thoughts that refuse to go away easily. They pace around in my head, sometimes silently almost on tiptoe but sometimes I can almost hear the footfalls.

“Don’t you get a migraine with such heavy-footed thoughts?” D asked me the question while sipping an exotic drink, the recipe of which she insisted was created from the lush creativity of her mind. Of course I didn’t believe that for a minute but I did think her migraine question was a good point. I was surprised that other than the occasional escaping thought, I wore this weight lightly. I had not yet gone stark, raving lunatic that was for sure. Or was it? But then again one person’s lunatic is another person’s genius! Oh the joys of living in a topsy-turvy  world where anything goes.

The last time I had felt the weight of a thought was when I was deciding between ice cream for dessert or dark chocolate. Seriously. Don’t remember now which dessert I went with, but I do remember that something escaped that night. I like to think that it was a stray thought but it could be the significant piece of my memory. Because I suddenly seem to have forgotten what I gave the cat next door to eat last summer.

The summer it died under mysterious circumstances.