I was pretty angry on Friday night. Not only did I have to send myself to my room for a bit, it got in the way of writing too.
I calmed down a bit later – a bit of after hours kitchen therapy can help sometimes. (Pulling apart a cooked chicken is also quite effective as an anger management tool, but I can’t always rely on having a cooked chicken to hand.)
Sometimes we hope for things – and then see them slide away from us before we can grasp hold of them. Or we begin to try walking a different path, and end up having to rush back along the familiar way, because a loved one can’t go there yet.
We become angry – not just at the change, but at the promise of something different, and the promise being denied.
Anger is a whirlwind, a cyclone that seems both to knock you over and whirl you up into it. You are off your feet before you know it.
And half the difficulty is looking back down at normality, knowing that your anger has raised you ‘six feet above contradiction’. Because it seems like the hardest part of anger is the coming back down again afterwards.
In my grand scheme of posting everyday, I’ve marked this as Friday – but am actually writing on Sunday. That’s OK. It takes time to come back down, to be grounded.
Writing about it is part of the coming back down, the determination not to be caught up again. Or at least, not to power the cyclone  further when only the tips of my toes are still on the ground.
Sometimes, in anger, it seems easier to be whisked away somewhere completely different and not return. (And if you can squash a witch under your house in the process, fair enough.)
But we do have to return. We come back and find that life is still moving ahead, and if we race along a little, we can jump back on.
When I started that last sentence, it felt being like a film character, flailing their way along the platform to jump onto the train before it leaves the station.
But in fact, I think it’s a bit like a roundabout. Life goes round (don’t we know it), and every now and then, it’s best to get off and let it go round a time or two before we get back on again.
I’d rather do that than actually look back in anger (to quote the title of a play). Looking back at anger allows me to see that the cyclone has moved on.
I return, fearing devastation all around – and in fact, the cyclone has mostly carved its track in me. So yes, there’s rebuilding to be done, but less than I fear.
The chicken was good, too, as it turns out.