The Unfair Thing

unfair

I was thinking about the unfair thing. Thinking about how unfair the unfair thing was. Thinking about the unfair thing upset me, it put me in bad form. It really made me feel terrible. And yet for some reason I couldn’t help thinking about it. I went over it and over it. I went over it and over it and over it. I was going over it like a machine for going over things. “The unfair thing’s so unfair!” I burst out, my voice charged with bitter emotion. People turned midway in their conversations to look at me. I was sitting in the corner in Arabica on Dominick Street, my favourite café and so this was very embarrassing. It really showed me up. I pretended that I was coughing in order to cover up the fact that I had just said that. I coughed so much that I spilled my coffee, which made people look at me even more. Even people who hadn’t been looking at me started looking at me.

 

Humiliated, I took my phone out and pretended to be very interested in something on it. I was having such a bad day. “Why did the unfair thing have to happen?” I said to myself (silently, in my own head, this time). I went back to thinking about the unfair thing. I went over it and over it. I went over it some more. I couldn’t stop going over it. My mind was a machine for going over the unfair thing. It was doing the job very well. It was going over the territory very thoroughly. The territory of how unfair the unfair thing was. I was feeling very upset at this stage. I could hardly contain myself. The thoughts about how unfair the unfair thing was were racing around my head so fast. Like Formula One racing cars at Goodwood. Like charged particles in a cyclotron. Going around faster and faster and faster. Accelerating up to 99.999% the speed of light…

 

“The unfair thing’s so unfair!” I burst out again. I squawked the words out in a voice that was choking with indignation. A mad, deranged kind of a voice. I couldn’t stop the words from bursting out of me. They just came out all by themselves and I wasn’t even embarrassed about it. I was just angry, this time. I glared around at everyone else in the café, for all the world as if they were somehow implicated in the unfairness of it all. I wanted to run up to people and tell them. Tell them how unfair it was. Shout at them about how unfair the unfair thing was. “It’s so unfair!” I wanted to shout, and shake them by their collars. Or by whatever I could grab hold of to shake them by. But I didn’t do that because I knew this would be weird. I didn’t want to look weird…

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