ends or beginnings

I could see it coming, but was unsure how to stop it. The day was ending and a new one about to begin. That was not the problem, however. The problem was that I knew what the next day would hold, and I didn’t have any way to change things. The anticipation was palpable. The anxiety had my heart beating like a drum line chorus in my chest. And then there were the butterflies in my stomach that had turned into something akin to weebles wobbling back and forth in my stomach. They never fell over, but they sure felt like they were going to cause my liver to beat a hasty retreat through my colon and my stomach to heave itself out of my body. There was no way that I could go through with this. I just could not wrap my mind around it nor could I get my body under control.

The next thing I knew, in the midst of all the chaos in my mind and my body, I was being moved about by what seemed like apparitions, pointing, and murmuring at me to move this way or that, to put on this frock and remove that one until I happened to catch sight of myself in the mirror, only to realize that it was not my mirror. The mirror was in the dressing room at the reception hall. I wondered how I had managed to get to this place, to this moment without ever remembering a thing about the day, when I noticed the ring on my left hand as it rested upon my lacy lingerie. I heard a sigh, and looked up from the ring on my hand to see him peering in at me from the doorway, with some sick, sadistic look of glee on his face. He quickly, and very quietly closed and locked the door to the dressing room. And so it happened… my body froze in its place, while my heart raced like a wild horse.