Diary of a Programmer 46: Derailed By A Single Text
yes, that’s right folks, a man can even be derailed
not by a train or a storm or anything so real but
a single notification on his phone can send him spiraling
through the ether of thought, into an abysmal state of tailspin,
where he loses track of the ground and the sky,
where he ends up somewhere, sometime else,
three, four hours later, after having done, thought
something unexpected, really, essentially, having time
travelled without ever evaporating into thin air,
without ever having had to invent a time travel machine,
without ever having witnessed the past or the future
outside of regret or worry, having been just taken
off the regular path of the morning, after receiving
just a slide-in-from-the-top-of-the-screen notification
that his girlfriend has booked an AirBnB flat
for their upcoming trip to Madrid, a reservation
that he was supposed to make and had yet to,
although he isn’t irked that she made a reservation,
and he wasn’t annoyed even though in her text she asked
if he was annoyed that she had made the reservation,
his thoughts started to go this way and that way,
and he found himself later, after making coffee, on his laptop
not forty five minutes after seeing the initial text,
imagining himself standing in a field of golden wheat,
as the sun beat down upon his shoulders and in his pocket
there was not a phone but a thick Swiss army knife
and a purple bandana that he had picked up on a trip
to Copenhagen three years before, and he was not distracted
except by flies which buzzed around his head,
but his thoughts ran down a stream unimpeded,
and he removed the bandana when the sweat collected
enough on his brow to wipe it off.