detonate

What is your day like when you become a minor character in your own life? Do you shuffle around the kitchen in socks too small while the main characters sit by the window deep in conversation and their third cup of coffee? You exit into the hallway while the spotlight's still on in the kitchen. You remembered your cues, good job. Now you can become the audience while the life around you continues. Sit. There's no need for a standing ovation.

And you feel like throwing a grenade. You feel like that's the only way you can gain control of the scene. The ghosts of who you might have been will disappear when they hear the pull of the pin. It's not like you meant to portray a soldier. That wasn't who you were cast to be. You were supposed to be in the kitchen with the conversation and coffee, not on a battlefield full of abandoned booby traps.

Still, the explosion is expected, so you shuffle out of the way. You aren't in any hurry. You have no place to be. The stage directions were left out of the script. All you have to do now is shield yourself from the fragments of what might have been.