I DID A BAD

I did a bad thing the other day.

It’s not as if I set out to do a bad thing, but I cannot, with my hand upon my heart, deny that it wasn’t something that I hadn’t been thinking about for quite some considerable time now. But, in the end, it was something of a snap decision, an impulsive act, and I’m fairly sure that I’m probably going to regret having done it and pay for it dearly in the long run.

That’s what happens if you put temptation in my way. Who was it who said that they could resist everything but temptation? Because they got it absolutely spot on. After all, it is a very human thing to decide that you really, really want something and then persuade yourself that there’s no real harm to be done if you pursue it and seize the opportunity, and, in the end, despite what has sometimes been suggested, I am only human.

I’m not proud of myself. Perhaps I should never have gone there in the first place, but the lights were so shiny and inviting, and the weasel words that were whispered into my eyes and the goods on display were all just so beautiful and irresistible that it was almost inevitable that something would catch my eye and lure me into its web of desire.

Oh, there were plenty of choices on offer, as well. Some of them I would never have touched with a barge pole, and would probably never have understood what all the fuss might be about them, and, to be perfectly honest, I was doing very well at resisting all of their dubious charms when my eye fell upon a thing of beauty, something I’d really only imagined in the back of my mind on those day-dreamy days when I really was just thinking about options and alternatives and things that I might do if I wasn’t already completely committed to the bird that I already had in the hand, which I’d already invested a lot of my time and energy into creating a credible and fairly long-lasting relationship with.

When I got up that morning it wasn’t even something that I wanted. I would go as far as to say that it had never even crossed my mind to cross a line that day, but sometimes an opportunity just comes at you out of the blue and, after perhaps a couple of minutes hesitation, you know that there’s going to be nothing you can do to resist it and you’ve already doomed yourself to go along for the ride.

Not only that, but you knew for the very first moment that you were going to and you were not going to allow anything to stop you from doing so, and that there was absolutely nothing that anyone else could have said or done at that precise moment that could have altered you from heading out in the direction of plotting the course to your own destruction and downfall.

Oh, in my head I might have discussed with myself how unwise it was. The head would have been screaming at the heart to take a moment and really think about what it was it was doing, but by then the heart wasn’t really paying any attention and that fleeting moment was already ebbing away and I really needed to act fast if this perhaps “once in a lifetime” opportunity wasn’t going to slip away from me forever and perhaps lead to a lifetime of regrets and “if onlys” and wishing that I had taken the chance when I could have.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have a perfectly good one at home, either. It was a little bulkier than was convenient which is why I’d been considering a slimmer model, one which it was far easier to take out and about with me on my various excursions without being laden down with all sorts of excess baggage.

So I looked at it, thought about the consequences for a full minute at least, and realised that I was going to feel guilty about it all day. But then I also realised that I’d been looking for something similar for quite some time now, and I might feel just as guilty if I let it slip through my fingers, especially as the rest of the world seemed to be very slow in recognising its charms as if the fates had truly decreed that we were actually made for each other and the rest of humanity needed to step back for a moment and let things unfold as they ought to.

So I knew full well that I was going to do a bad thing, and then I went ahead and did it anyway, and the thing that I was so tempted by wasn’t something that I really, really needed.

But, do you know what? I’ve no regrets.

I can still hold my head up high. So what? I know I’ve done a bad thing, but I also think that I might just have got away with it, because it was such a bargain that I really couldn’t have resisted it no matter how hard I tried, and I just threw myself at the chance and took the opportunity and decided to worry about the consequences later, and even if it turns out that it was last year’s model, it’s still a lot fancier that the old one that I was struggling along with.

Amazon “Black Friday” Deals.

God, they’re so hard to resist.