Vignette: Anticipation Mechanics

The trouble with anticipation is that it always imagines itself as an epic. One minute you’re ambling through your day, and the next you’re Indiana Jones sprinting toward a stone doorway that’s already half-closed. Inside: treasure, bathed in that rich amber glow you only get in cinemas and fantasies. Outside: you, doing the maths, realising the odds aren’t great but hurtling forward anyway because, well — what if?

This morning, the wall finished its abrupt, inevitable slide. A glimpse, a small apologetic shrug, then the clean mechanical thunk of the universe letting me know the scene is over. Not tragic. Not unfair. Just poor timing. Curtain down.

And so I found myself, a couple of hours later, sitting at the dining table in my own private reenactment of the old-man scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey — that bright, sterile room where every tiny sound becomes an event. The scrape of metal on china. The echo of your own swallow. The ridiculous clarity of your pulse thudding in your ears like the generator on a worksite. As if the entire world has stepped back to let you hear how loud your inner life actually is.

There’s something honest about that silence. It strips away the cinematic nonsense. No swelling soundtrack, no cosmic winks from fate. Just a man, a grapefruit, and the dawning realisation that the mountain of emotion he’s lugging around is entirely self-generated. Who needs a straitjacket when your own mind is so committed to doing laps around itself, making any damage entirely internal?

That’s the thing about anticipation: it builds elaborate sets for stories you’re still scanning the cast list for to see if you even have a part in. It projects treasure where there may have only been the shimmer of possibility. But even having the door close — cleanly, kindly — doesn’t cancel the fact of the lurch you felt when it was still open a crack.

And maybe that’s fine. Maybe being capable of that lurch is its own small proof that something in me is still keyed to wonder, to curiosity, to the faintest scent of “what if.” The sliding wall is shut for now, yes. But anticipation is a creature of habit. It wanders off, paces in circles, then eventually trots back with something new in its jaws — often disguised as a Thursday morning, or a stray idea, or just the right sentence forming in the quiet.

For now, the silence can have me. I’ve earned a moment of hearing myself think — even if it’s uncomfortably clear. Cue Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Alone again (naturally). Really brain? Really? Alright, at least I can hum its merry tune as I throw the grapefruit skins into the compost bin.