Breakdown

After a few days have gone by with everything perfect—a little too perfect—no work, no meetings, no exams, no trouble—you set on with a jig of motivation to accomplish the totality of your procrastination: all the tasks that you’ve been putting off, all the things that you thought about doing but couldn’t every night as you went to sleep head-to-toe exhausted, all the shopping, phone calls, dozens of emails, the small claims court case against your previous landlord, a research project, room cleaning, house cleaning, anything and everything and then some more, all until everything that was perfect is no longer perfect, and a simple Amazon misdelivery or a traffic jam on your way to the grocery store chip away at your marble statue of an ideal day; chip, chip, and suddenly, you’re on the floor, with a cardboard box, sobbing, throwing up, spiraling.

…

Nothing is more vomit-provoking than the breakdown after the day that everything was supposed to go well. An early morning wakeup follows a three-hour house fixing session where you re-grout your shower tiles and fix your back door and your dryer settings and the lubrication on your closet mirror, and a short nap is interrupted by the Instacart delivery from Costco worth $336.87 piled up high and wide against your garage door, and you drag it in while also fumbling to haul up the thirty-pound brand-new bed frame to the bedroom fresh from Amazon, and you call the electricity company and then the gas company, and you fill out the JD-CV-11 form you’ve been putting off, and you drive to Stop & Shop and come back to chop up dinner and cut up cardboard boxes and assemble the bed frame and put on the new mattress and as you realize that the mattress is a queen and not a full, you sit down, and you pause, and you break.

Prompt from Daily Themes Week 10: Adjectives
Write a two-part theme, two versions of a description of the same sizable object or feeling, using one device discussed in lecture per part. Devices include but are not limited to: a) polysyndeton b) asyndeton c) gradatio/climax d) hypobolic topping e) adynaton