How it all fell apart remains a baffling and enigmatic thing. Like a twist ending to a story I wasn’t writing, somehow inserted into the narrative that is my life.
Conversations are so complex, and sometimes I find them hard to follow. I oscillate between crushing clarity and so much mental turbulence as to send my coherence into a nosedive. I’m a smart person, but sometimes I feel reduced to a mental toddler when the layers are too thin and too myriad at once. Like a strange oral baklava with too many flakey strati to count.
How did I get here? seems an increasingly common thought, and I wonder if it’s just the situation in which I find myself causing the cognitive dissonance. I was tracking every detail so clearly. I had such a strong point of view. I knew I was right. Nope. Sometimes you start there, and end somewhere completely different.
“One ticket to Tampa, please.”
“Absolutely! Here is your ticket!”
“Wait, why am I in Cheyenne…”
“Because you bought a ticket to Tampa, of course.”
The attendant’s calmly cheerful tone throws me even further off kilter. Apparently, I’m the one who isn’t keeping up here. Unlikely. But more plausible by the minute.
“Umm… right. Thanks.” I take the ‘Welcome to WY!’ pamphlet she shoved at me, and study it curiously. No one gives brochures at deboarding anymore, right? Suddenly it feels like I’m in a 90s movie. I open it and stare blankly at the words inside.
What the… that makes even less sense than any of the airport chicanery. I just got out of town. And to a completely different out of town than I was trying to get. Why would I come to Wyoming to start running? I fold the pre-creased sections of pamphlet back into a closed position and take a deep breath. Okay. What does this mean? No one in the vicinity looks even remotely dangerous. I re-open the creases once more, just to check myself. I know I read it correctly, but all the same, it seems the responsible thing to do.
Wait. I know I read it correctly. Didn’t I just say that? I close it once more, and reopen, working the creases faster, and wondering if they will tear under the use.
“Gotcha. Welcome to Tampa.”
I blink a number of times in quick succession, my body leaving my brain behind and trying to make sense of this mysterious pamphlet on its own. Go for it, body. Maybe you’ll have better luck without me. Once more the creases close, and I almost expect them to creak like an old oak door now.
The front page is an old friend at this point, with how stoic and steady it’s been. The unchanging words are comforting, and I hesitate before opening once more. What will I find inside next?
The interior text doesn’t change this time. The valley between truth and hallucination grows and shrinks at once, and I pull the little cardstock culprit closer to my eyes. As if that will change anything. Curious, I rub at the ink with my thumb and forefinger, but it doesn’t budge. Well, I give up.
I make eye contact with the family of four on the inside of the Wyoming tourism board’s attempt at coaxing me into thinking this is a great place to land. That they distribute after I’ve already landed, for some reason… can’t spend too much time on that thought. There they are, smiling suspiciously while casting fishing lines into what looks like a backyard pond, not a fish-stocked lake.
“You’re big.” The little girl with shockingly white hair and freckles on her nose speaks the obvious, but it doesn’t register with me as funny or even out of the ordinary.
“You’re little.” I quip back, and that seems to be the end of the conversation. I go to close the creases, but the little voice chirps out from the tri-fold torturer.
“Don’t mind the words. They like to play tricks on people.” So the text demon or whatever it is, is a repeat offender. Your honor, I’d like to remind the courtroom that the scare tactics employed by the analog AI inside this pamphlet have been perpetrated upon countless visitors to Tampa, er Cheyenne, er… here… and it has to stop. You can end the suffering today, with your just and swift verdict in favor of my client.
I snort at my own joke, and the relief travels down to my fingertips. Laughter really is good medicine.
“Thanks,” I say to the little girl who is now somehow a brown bear cub with a fish hanging halfway out of its mouth. Seems right. Tampa is big salmon country, right? I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere.
I close the troublesome piece of 100 lb paper and go to put it in my bag. But I don’t have a bag, do I? That’s right. It’s clearly too cold to carry a bag in the snow. The “Welcome to New York” marketing ploy really is silly. Why would I ever go to the beach when I could skate down the icy streets of Tampa? I breathe in the air deeply. Nothing like the Cheyenne air, but the comfort is fleeting when I remember that I’ve been in my living room the whole time.
“Did you hear what I just said?”
There it is again. The conversation that rolled downhill with my participation, but somehow not my consent. I heard you. I just didn’t know where I was.
“Sorry. I’m not sure how we got here.”
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