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Nervous Breakdown Scenario #45 (in the key of E)
So today was a bad day at work.
On the way home, I imagined how my nervous breakdown will go: I will snap one day and realize that I have Never Achieved My Dreams. I will sneak out of the office (I'm not the storming type) and set out to follow my star. Scrambling for what exactly My Dreams are, and here I'm going with the assumption that my mind is a hat full of slips of paper listing my various desires, I'll dig around a little and pull up one from my childhood. This will be the very early one involving riding horseback across the country along the side of various interstates. I found this particular fantasy to be quite useful on long car trips; it lost its shine a bit when I was old enough to realize that riding a horse along an interstate would be smelly, unpleasant, and highly dangerous. But in this nervous breakdown scenario of mine, I forget all that and decide to do it.
So I would steal a horse and get out on the road. Please picture a nearly thirty-year-old woman in business casual attire, her eyes wild, bumping along I-40 on the back of what's most likely a stodgy old Quarter horse from someone's backyard. Tack consists of a faded nylon halter, let's say purple, with a mismatched lead line and probably an old Western saddle that's seen better days (and they wouldn't get much worse than this one). I would probably be singing.
Some kind soul would call my husband, and he'd turn up in the Outback, driving slowly alongside me with his hazards on. He'd roll down the passenger-side window and lean across to try to talk some sense into me. I'd ignore him, bent on reclaiming my joy, grasping happiness, and Achieving My Dreams, dammit.
At some point, he'd pull out the fact (entirely made up by me for this breakdown scenario) that according to a very old law, horse theft is still punishable by hanging in North Carolina. Good news, though! The law only takes effect if I take the horse outside of the county. Finally, somewhat disheartened by the threat of being hung by the neck until dead, I rein in my faithful steed just before the county line.
...So anyway. That's how I think it might go.
On the way home, I imagined how my nervous breakdown will go: I will snap one day and realize that I have Never Achieved My Dreams. I will sneak out of the office (I'm not the storming type) and set out to follow my star. Scrambling for what exactly My Dreams are, and here I'm going with the assumption that my mind is a hat full of slips of paper listing my various desires, I'll dig around a little and pull up one from my childhood. This will be the very early one involving riding horseback across the country along the side of various interstates. I found this particular fantasy to be quite useful on long car trips; it lost its shine a bit when I was old enough to realize that riding a horse along an interstate would be smelly, unpleasant, and highly dangerous. But in this nervous breakdown scenario of mine, I forget all that and decide to do it.
So I would steal a horse and get out on the road. Please picture a nearly thirty-year-old woman in business casual attire, her eyes wild, bumping along I-40 on the back of what's most likely a stodgy old Quarter horse from someone's backyard. Tack consists of a faded nylon halter, let's say purple, with a mismatched lead line and probably an old Western saddle that's seen better days (and they wouldn't get much worse than this one). I would probably be singing.
Some kind soul would call my husband, and he'd turn up in the Outback, driving slowly alongside me with his hazards on. He'd roll down the passenger-side window and lean across to try to talk some sense into me. I'd ignore him, bent on reclaiming my joy, grasping happiness, and Achieving My Dreams, dammit.
At some point, he'd pull out the fact (entirely made up by me for this breakdown scenario) that according to a very old law, horse theft is still punishable by hanging in North Carolina. Good news, though! The law only takes effect if I take the horse outside of the county. Finally, somewhat disheartened by the threat of being hung by the neck until dead, I rein in my faithful steed just before the county line.
...So anyway. That's how I think it might go.