Centrifugal Force

Other people's words and opinions filled Letitia's head. Like arrows they quivered and shot, darting around, confusing her and causing chaos with her own thoughts.
Too many of these words and thoughts didn't sit well with her own. Too many expressions and opinions were repeated but didn't seem to make sense. All at once she felt invaded and paralysed.

She found herself shaking her head as the voices in the media tried to tell her how to interpret things. She found herself disinterested as the voices in society seemed to be saying nothing new or interesting. She felt tired and couldn't tell what was genuine exhaustion or merely boredom.

Her own fluid thoughts were tapped and interrupted again and again by the words of others, until she became overwhelmed and immobilised.
Physical and metal activity became more and more difficult. As she walked her lines became curved, as she spoke her voice wavered and her words lost their order. She felt all imagination and instinct in the world was being slowly eroded and no one but her had noticed. The television began to repeat the same 3 shows again and again and again on all the channels. People were only talking about cake and cats and sparkly clothes. There was a 2 minute news update every day but it became lighter and lighter and no one seemed to care about it anymore.

She turned off the radio, the TV, the Internet, the phones, she closed tight all the doors and windows, placed headphones in her ears, shut her eyes, and blasted Vivaldi's Four Seasons into her head.

At first she stood motionless in the middle of the room and listened to the demanding strings as they bowed with confidence. Then, as the tune began to lift and sing, her arms gradually rose up and out, and she straightened her elbows and fingers. Unwanted conversations and memories and images still lingered in her head, and felt she needed to fly away from them.
Then she began to turn. Slowly at first. All the time her eyes closed.
Lower notes pushed at her: quivering, edgy and powerful, and she felt the cold wind of early spring tugging at her hair. As the higher notes returned, she saw the bright green curl and twist of rising shoots, she saw the faces of newborn lambs as they bounced around their mothers, and she heard the cacophony of nesting birds.
She turned faster, feeling the sharp new air of March fill her nostrils and felt soft new leaves tickle her arms.
Open, feather-edged wings soared against a blue sky and her heart began to climb too.

She span faster still. But felt neither dizzy nor exhausted. She felt as if she was hardly moving

Words and conversations stopped repeating in her conscience and bit by bit the voices began to flick away on the breeze.

On each forward and backward bow of the strings, pieces of detritus rhythmically loosened from the middle of her thoughts and images began to fly outwards. The cats went first: they flew straight at the walls of her inner vision and hung against the curve of her inner eye. Soon they were joined by television news presenters, then The Great British Bake Off celebrities, and then women in sparkly dresses and fake tans with over-mascara-ed vacant expressions. Great sponge cakes flew out at everybody and every thing, breaking up and causing a soft creamy-yellow ring of crumb-covered sequins and fur which hovered for a second and then everything was sucked straight out of her head and away. It was gone. Everything was gone.

The music finished.
Still and calm, Letitia dropped to the floor and fell asleep.

When she awoke she looked around, thought her own thoughts, saw her own world. She knew she had her own brain back. She stood up and went in a straight line to the front door and went for a long long walk.


Centrifugal force is not a true force but is actually the effect of inertia, in that the moving object's natural tendency is to move in a straight line.