Brownian Emotion

Sometimes I want to scream and shout and smash things in a fit of raw, instinctive, and inexplicable destruction.

Last summer I consigned one glass and two plates into shards of recycling and vacuum dust. Nobody noticed the glass, there were too many of them anyway, spread across multiple cupboards, collecting dust in a household that had no guests. A joke was made about the plates, something about my disdain for their squareness. It might have been true on some level, I had always maintained that plates should be circular.

One evening, I was standing alone in the living room, just as the sun was setting, spilling its pastel hues across the darkening sky. I was watching the dust swirling apathetically in the orange light filtering through the window and was suddenly so overcome with this rage that I grabbed my Father’s empty cognac bottle from the coffee table and hurled it out of the door, onto the concrete patio slabs. I had wanted it to smash into a thousand smithereens and scatter across the ground like little stars. I had wanted to hear that loud crashing crescendo that has the power to silence entire restaurants. Instead, I’d managed to throw with just the right trajectory such that the bottle’s reinforced bottom caught the stone slab at the perfect angle and it bounced right back up. Whole. And disappeared behind a verdant rose bush. The unexpected outcome filled me with a strange mix of smugness and dissatisfaction. Surely, odds of that throw were comically low?

I imagined someone finding the bottle again. Maybe my Father would see it in the winter when the foliage subsided and gaps emerged in the flower bed and think he’d left it there. Or perhaps a stranger would find it, years from now, when they were landscaping what used to be our garden. They would wonder how it got there, and maybe, if they were so inclined, they would come up with some narrative: an alcoholic gardener, a summer bbq with rowdy guests, or teenagers. Teenagers often got the blame. I doubted that anyone would ever stumble on the correct sequence of events. That was the problem with archaeology, it was based on a snapshot, the time axis was missing.

I walked away, leaving the bottle buried in the foliage.