Prematurely senile

I was walking home from work the other day, caught up in my own thoughts. Everything that was happening at work at the moment, friends I had spoken to recently, friends I hadn't spoken to in a while. Lost in my thoughts, caught in a world merged between fantasy and memory. Flashes of thought zipping through my mind on hyperactive neurons.

I hadn't realised how deeply I was lost in thought. How far away I was from the reality around me. Or how I was gesticulating fervently in line with my thoughts. Until I startled a poor innocent passerby.

"Aah!" He threw me a panicked look and shuffled quickly to the other end of the sidewalk. I remember the exact moment in my thoughts. I'd been going over an incident that occured earlier that morning, and thinking 'But why?! WHY?!'. And I'd subconsciously raised my arms in a dramatic gesture of questionning, startling the bejeezus out of poor Johnny D walking by me at that moment.

The look he shot me said clearly, omg you're mad.

And I wasn't about to take that. I mean, I'm not mad. Well, not classified as such anyway. So I had to pretend that the sudden hand gesture was not the movement of a woman enraptured by her own ranting thoughts.

Infact, I took it a step further. I pretended the movement had been a deliberate movement, to stretch my arm, as though it had I was gingerly stretching out a pulled muscle or something. So I deliberately, slowly repeated the gesture again. And again. And again.

See, I'm just stretching my poor wounded arm. And splaying my fingers. It may LOOK as though I'm doing a mad gesture, but really its just an exercise, see. Aah, feels better now, I can stop.

I cast a sideways glance at the man, to see if he had noticed my redeeming gestures. He wasn't looking at me (in fact had probably long forgotten about me), but just incase he too was casting a sideways glance at me, I did one more stretch. For good measure.

It was only after I turned the corner and was off on my own path that I thought back through the incident and realised how I had inadvertantly converted his suspicions to reality through my subsequent actions. Maybe I am really going mad.