Your girlfriend left you, your boss says you’ll need to step up the quality of your production considerably if you expect to make the cut for the upcoming company downsize, and you came home to find your cat dead on the floor. Having suffered for what could almost completely universally be called a bad day, you feel sweet treat would do you good, so you decide to crack open a nice cold sugary soft drink.
You pull up on the stay-tab and the scored mouth of the can cracks just enough to hiss before the ring pull snaps and comes free of the can. You experience a moment of pure disbelief, looking first at the now ring-less can in your left hand, cracked open just enough for a hint of foam to fizz out as if teasing you, then to the ring still pinched between your thumb and forefinger, torn from its aluminum mount.
Your disbelief fades quickly. Something gentle and loving deep inside your chest breaks open and a horrible monster made of rage and violence leaps forth, declaring to the world that only speaks the language of destruction and it will be heard.
The monster’s first action is to throw the soda can onto the hard tile of your kitchen floor, enlarging the crack in the scoring of the lid and sending a wild spray of foaming high fructose hate across the room. The refrigerator door looks ripe for kicking and the monster doesn’t like the fruits of fury to spoil, so it puts three nice new foot-size dents in your ice box. Custom.
The monster never likes your kitchen cabinets; it’d be a shame if anything happened to them. You know, like if it ripped the doors off them one by one and broke them over the edge of the counter. The monster does this after putting a few fist-sized holes in your kitchen wall on the walk over.
The dishes inside your cabinet look crowded and uncomfortable so the monster decided to give them a breath of fresh air by throwing every single one of them against the far concrete wall of the dining room.
The monster eyes the glass top of your dining room table, but as it moves you across the kitchen floor you both slip in the soda covering the tile and fly ass-up into the air. When the back of your head hits the ground, the monster goes back to sleep.
Breathing heavily, you sit up and look around at the destroyed remains of your apartment. You look at the little object that started all this, the soda can, and realize that’s not where it started at all. Every little bit of anger you let control you instead of processing your emotion in more productive ways led up to this. Every time you yelled at your girlfriend until she got fed up with your shit and left. Every time you made excuses and blamed others for your lack of drive at work. Every time you hissed at your cat when she clawed your leg because you’d forgotten to feed her that day. All these miniscule moments scooped tiny bites of food into the mouth of a monster called rage that grew inside you until you could no longer contain it, because you let the bars of its cage made of patience and love rust and corrode.
You rub your head and stand up, surveying the room. It’s time to fix some shit around here.