How not to gather

I was woken by an image in my head, of a woman who looked just like my mother, but broader built, thicker set. She was in her 40s/50s maybe and was wearing a wedding suit, pencil skirt with an off-the-shoulder jacket, and in her upswept hair was some kind of glittering headpiece/comb with the veil swirling out behind. She was laughing, very joyful. The image stayed a couple of seconds and disappeared. It felt like a glimpse into one of the otherworlds, those moments where timelines split and fan out, a place where she didn't didn't marry the wrongest of men and didn't develop severe mental illness, a world where she could be healthy and happy, perhaps a world in which I never existed at all.

Then I was awake proper and heard the whistler outside. It was a thoroughly inocuous tune and stopped quickly, but there's no way to make whistling in the dark anything other than sinister. Folklore the world over declares it to be a bad idea; doing it is said to attract, er, interest, and responding to it is said to be thoroughly dangerous. I toyed with the idea of whistling back, just to be mischievous, but I decided against it. After all, if I whistled back at it, it might whistle back at me, we might end up whistling at each other until daybreak and and at the very least I would have gathered myself a nutter who knows where I live. I might end up trapped in one of the old stories. Also, I would wake Russ up.

I have already gathered myself a something.

And rather than go into it too deeply, I shall vent. Just a moment's ungraciousness and I shall be done. What I should say to a certain person is this:

'Come now, no need to leave the group, you're not being rejected. No-one is slighting your writing, it's just a case of tone. You are awesome at this [insert example] and that [insert another example] and the work you did on [insert successful task] was wonderful. Please don't feel unappreciated, no-one intends that at all.'

As opposed to what I want to say which is:

'Oh get up, you ridiculous manbaby.'

There now, better.