Savouring the Taste of Freedom

      Ever work with someone best described as a verbal vortex?  The minute he approaches, you feel your heart race, and you start looking for escape routes. This person knows you, though, so you can't pretend you don't speak the language. As in a nightmare, your limbs feel heavy and you can never move fast enough to avoid detection. He asks, rather ponderously, do you have a minute, and you think, yes, that was it right there, but you nod and say sure.  He begins to drone on about how to clean the computer keyboards, or how to replace the staple cartridge in the photocopier, while you watch the best years of your life slipping away. Because he is kind and ethical, you feel that much lousier as you stand there thinking of ways to extricate yourself.

       Your friend is far smarter than you; she has gone to the lengths of having children and raising them to be responsible, so they will have jobs she has to drive them to. While the vortex traps you in conversation, your friend announces cheerfully that she must drop her child at work, and off she goes while you curse yourself for not bearing children or at least adopting or fostering one or two.

      You’ve come to look like a hypochondriac with all of the appointments you’ve pretended to dash to: dentist, optometrist, gynaecologist, massage therapist, physiotherapist, chiropractor, internist, and now, even, a podiatrist to help you deal with a sixth toe that has suddenly appeared on your right foot.
      Having daily encounters with the vortex has helped you understand the trapped animal’s instinct to chew off his own limb to get free. During a particularly long discussion on past participles, you considered gnawing off your hand—surreptitiously, of course -- and then dropping it in front of you.  Oh shoot, you might say casually, I'd better get that looked at. Or perhaps you’d just leave it there, as a temporary distraction, while you made your escape stage left. Of course the vortex is not easily shaken from his reverie, so it might take more than a detached hand to stop his lumbering train of thought. Could you fake a seizure?  You can almost taste the blood in your mouth as you imagine biting into your tongue, but instead you remain upright.  You listen and smile until your face begins to ache, and then suddenly you remember that cat scan, or was it an MRI, you booked to examine that sixth toe that’s been giving you grief, and you gesture at your toe, and, for good measure, vaguely at your head, and off you go, out into the sunlight, savouring the taste of freedom.