Impressions
Another thing I collect, like stories of irony, are impressions of people who, for one reason or another, fascinate me. These impressions are little more than sketches, the type a friend of mine used to make in cafes or airports as she observed parents interacting with their children, couples waiting together for their flight, or people sitting alone, absorbed in the books they were reading.
Here are a few impressions I rediscovered today in old journals:
8 November, 2023
Man strides into the clinic waiting room. Each step carries his foot as far as if he’d thrown it. He already carries a yellow slip indicating he’s registered for labs—he already has a purpose. The man’s torso is compressed in relation to his legs, giving the impression of a beetle scurrying on stilts.
“Morning,” he says to the receptionist with such familiarity you’d think they’d known each other for years. He doesn’t slow at the reception desk, that rampart guarding against inadvertent or unjustified incursion. Man reaches box where yellow slips are to be deposited. He slides it into the box, and only after doing so does he look up for the first time. He blinks dumbly, like a sleepwalker awakening in bewilderment at his surroundings. His purpose is gone—it has been completed—and he is now deprived of the self-certainty that launched him like a catapult projectile passed the ramparts. He turns in place and blinks twice more before walking to a chair at a tenth of his previous pace. Only when he has retrieved his iPad from his bag does he relax. He can now retreat into the fortress of a new purpose. But that brief interval during which he drifted, confused? Agony.
8 November, 2023
Woman enters clinic: she stalks from door to security desk in foyer.
The security guard greets her. “Are you here for urgent care?” the security guard says. He’s the most Midwestern security guard I’ve observed, polite and welcoming as a concierge at a high-end hotel.
“No,” the woman says. She thrusts her neck forward and squints into the distance as if the sudden opacity of the air were the only reason she could not identify her target. She offers only negation; she says nothing about where she is going, only where she’s not. The security concierge can do no more than watch helplessly as she continues to stare like she’s staring into the sun.
9 November, 2023
Overhearing a medical student talk to a friend:
She cannot go to University X for her med/psych internship because “my god, can you imagine living there?”
She cannot go to University Y because “they require the meningitis vaccine, and I’m not getting that!”
Cannot go to Universities A, B, or C because [inaudible reasons].
“I need a beer (it’s 10:00 AM) to figure out my life crisis.”
What bravery to have faced such an existential dilemma at all, let alone without a beer.
9 November, 2023
Her face round, her eyes heavily lidded, her mouth naturally turned up at the corners, giving an impression of weary merriment. As if she is at a party she should have left hours ago, and though she is in terrible danger of falling asleep on her feet, she cannot bring herself to leave. The rare benevolence of fate that has united these exact people, each in the perfect mood, is something too extraordinary to forsake.
13 November, 2023
On the bus, back from the hospital: man with a white hospital bedsheet wrapped around his shoulders, no shoes, ocher hospital socks flopping off the ends of his feet. He sees the bus and crosses the street. It’s two lanes but wide enough for six. A coming car doesn’t bother slowing. It just blares its horn with gleeful indignation as it drives through the trailing corner of the white sheet. Is the driver offended at how the man crossed the street or at the existence of the man? Man still wears hospital ID bracelet as he boards the bus, the empty toes of his socks slapping the ground like flippers. When he is seated, he puts on a surgical mask as if to say his physical well-being is his highest concern.