Virtual Hyperbole

Friday was an awkward and sad day. My boss' mom (E.) died. She actually died at my workplace, which is actually not as weird as it sounds. I work here , at Harborview Medical Center, and E. had been admitted the day before. My boss (M.) had left earlier that week to go on an annual 2 week vacation with her family. "Hawaii has never seemed so far away," she said to me on the phone that day. M. was stuck at the airport trying to book an emergency flight back home mere days before Christmas so she could see E. before she died. She didn't make it. In the meantime, M. asks me to call Father Mark (the hospital's resident catholic chaplain) to give communion to her mom. She also asks me to go up to the unit and sit with A. and E. for awhile. To paint a broad stroke, in the realm of family dynamics, M. is the pragmatic one and A. (her younger sister) is the emotional one. A. lives in Europe, but was back to spend the holidays with E., and give M. a bit of a breather fro...

Holy crap. This guy just walked into my office, and he looked almost exactly like this guy I used to date in high school and college. It freaked me out. My heart lurched, my face flushed, my pulse started racing, my knees got shaky. I think I started to sweat. Fuck. What is that about? And this kid is the same age as and looked like M. back then . So while my logical brain is processing the fact that it is IMPOSSIBLE that M. has actually travelled through time to visit me, my body has this amazing visceral reaction. It took about a minute of slow breathing to get back control of my freaked-out physiology. And in that time, I could not stop staring at him. Poor kid; I'm like this creepy old (old er ) woman to him. Thank the good lord that I did not blurt out anything wildly stupid in my senile confusion. "Hey M.! Wanna go see Pink Floyd and fuck on the hood my car? Uh, ahem. I mean ... ummm. Look, they have corn chowder in the cafeteria today! See ya!" It's not even l...