My mood is a perfectly symmetrical, matching set of cement shoes….

I absorb my moods through my surroundings.

Wishing Jerry was not holding his hands up in front of his eyes I tried to explain: you bring your moods with you, right?

Hmmm.

OK. I sometimes soak my moods up from my surroundings, I told him. Here is an example that would be hilarious if it were not about me. We were out at a big bar/restaurant and I needed to use the ladies room. But the floor was too slippery. I couldn't walk on that floor. Someone would have to help me. Maybe a waitress or the bartender? I would never make it, step by frightened step all the way across that slick surface.

Embarrassed, but immobilized, I told Jerry, I can't walk across the floor. I'll slip.

He was wide-eyed.

Grabbing a waitress I confessed, I am afraid I'll slip on the floor, could you walk with me….

Sounds like I take pills and the room tips, doesn't it? Nope. Sounds like I am stoned and imagining things, right? Like a boyfriend I had in college who decided that some acid would be nice. He told me that he thought he saw a small question mark crawl out into the room and grow bigger and bigger.

The slick floor was the prompt of a really corrosive mood and my mind sort of gave up. My surroundings swallowed me. Really.

I can't get on Interstate 95 if my mood woke up with the strength of Balsa wood, rather than oak. Some days I can't talk to people. Well, I can. I can even sound normal, but overwhelmingly I do not want to reach inside and drag out my voice. I do so with protest. Then, just to salt this thick stupid oozing wound are the little devils inside me jabbing at one another with really pointy little swords. I am upset with myself for being such a drag for Jerry. It's not high maintenance. It's undertow. It's not like I can just stop making demands already. I am just overwhelmed and not functioning. Funny thing though … I can pull myself through it without witnesses. Somehow when this horrible mood, which I try to envision as some separate thing from myself -- a paisley business suit with bright yellow stripes and fake leopard waist-band -- grips me, it thrives on attention. I give it tons of fuel by worrying what Jerry must be going through from the outside looking in. He fuels it be being miffed. Takes him quite a long time to finally realize he does not have a tool to tighten whatever is loose in my head, but he is human. He is patient, but he is human, and I am possessed.

If I brush up against poor lighting I become irritable. Too much noise wraps around me and I buckle. If my gaze collides with places I do not like, I am doomed. Do not take me for a ride along Pershing Drive in Ansonia with its cheep, plastic, fluorescent discount stores filled with hopeless people soothing boredom with bargain shopping and by habit and rote filling their lives with crap.

It makes me sad and desperate to see Big Mega Huge Discount Club looming across a city block surrounded by blacktop for miles, and people just shuffling in, shuffling out.

So there we are tonight seated under lighting that bugs me. Jerry, My Friend Gerald. He proposes to stab himself with a fork, perhaps? Glaring up at a low-hanging light, I know he is assessing the cord. Will it support his weight if he wraps it around his neck? My neck? All because the bar was full and they sent us with our drinks to the vast emptiness of a dining room illuminated by bulbs casting a pall across the space. Skin shone with a drained and boodles color. Ick Ick Ick. And my mood is gone. Stephanie comes over with her hair bobbing and takes our drink orders. Ick. Her brow splashes shade across eyes pushed deep in her face above cheekbones glowing with this life-sucking light.

Oh, what a bad night. The seats were wrong and the lighting was like a dishrag and I just did not have the capacity to twist my expression into Normal Face. This was close to my shut-down mode, but not all the way there where I hear and see, but my eyes are frozen to a spot on the ground and I just hunch over. Jerry drove my inert unblinking body all the way to Maine while I was like this. The long car ride on ugly highway the whole way just smothered me.

Sometimes I write as if I have been holding my breath, and other times I stare at my fingers limp on the keys waiting for the words to come. Enough with the dramatic moods. Where is Lily, who whips through the woods with feet made of springs?