Not-sunflowers

    

I don't know what today was. I'm still reeling slightly from it. I had a regular night, minus a call from the spouse who is travelling (but I'm used to it so it was nothing unusual). I slept early because I knew I had to wake up early to go to work. And then I woke up, with the alarm this time, my insides filled with an inexplicable ache. It was like someone tugging at my gut, my heart, my soul. I turned but couldn't get out of bed. I felt exhausted. But I didn't do anything the night before to feel that tired! I told myself I'd just skip today, work from home, and go another day. Then I lay in bed for ten more minutes until I had to get up anyway to pee. And I knew my morning had already begun, and I foresaw the regret I'd have had had I stayed at home another day, so I got ready. And I left the house, face un-moisturized and all.

Every time I step out of the house, I feel like I'm working against an invisible force like gravity. By the time I reach the end of my day, it takes a toll on me. Everything was fine, nobody was mean to me. I was even asked to join some colleagues for lunch, which I did. But as the day progressed, I felt a need to curl back into myself, even though I was sitting in a corner of the office, all by myself, with absolutely no pressure to socialize or behave in a particular way. I just wanted to cry. And so I braved it out until 4 pm and decided to go home early. It's nighttime now and my shoulders ache and my body is trembling slightly. Maybe it is that my mind keeps going back to a couple of stressful incidents I've had recently but I didn't think they were that major. Or were they?

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In the recent years, sunflowers have picked up quite a lot of clout, thanks to information coming in that Vincent Van Gogh suffered from an illness and his brother, who loved him very much, used to get him sunflowers — partly thanks to Hannah Gadsby's very popular special from 2018. They even have a dedicated room literally bursting with sunflowers in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. But here's the thing. It kind of annoys me when people share pictures of any odd flower with yellow petals and a dark centre labelling it as a sunflower. They're not sunflowers. They're Black-eyed Susans. And they're tiny compared to sunflowers, anyone can tell. But apparently not.