It hangs over me like gray hangs over the Midwest in March, like rain hangs over our city as if it has come to stay, like life and its demands hang over my shoulders bowing my back with their weight.  It drapes its dreary self around me, swallowing me like an oversized jacket, and I find myself lost in its billowing folds.  I regard myself in the mirror, but all I see reflected back is the cloud-cover.

Overwhelmed.  Overextended.  Overdrawn.  Feeling decidedly at a deficit, I snap at the only ones safe enough to be snapped at.  Guilt consumes me—raising like fog, gray on gray, to further obscure all visibility.  

Like a cat that has had too many objects tied to its tail in his lifetime, I have tired of trying to shake it.  I regard it with weary disdain, eventually settling in to lick my wounds and give off a generally offended air.  Not unlike the cat’s, such airs go completely ignored—as they should be.  But the indifference irritates me, nonetheless.

It will be gone by morning—evaporated perhaps even before the lights go out for the evening.  Nothing but a fine mist will linger, eventually blown away by the morning breeze.  All will be sunny again.  But for now, I am in a foul mood, and if you’ll excuse me, my cat and I have some sulking to do.

overload reflection