I walk into work on a Monday morning after a weekend of welcome respite…running a little, as seems to be my habit of late. Who am I kidding, it’s always been my habit.
The halls are dark. There is no one in the main office at the end of that long shadowed hallway. The cavernous lobby echoing my footsteps. My face begins to take on a look of puzzlement.
I key my way into the finance department, peering through the small window as I do so. There is a weird niggling in the pit of my stomach. It too, is dark and empty. I open the door to my office and fire up my laptop. As I wait for it to spring to life, I walk to another window to peer into the neighboring department, also dark and empty.
It’s times like these I begin to question my own sanity (yes, that’s an admission. This kind of thing has happened before). It feels like that dream, the one where you walk into your classroom only to discover you forgot to put on any pants.
WTF?! Is everyone in a meeting somewhere that I forgot about? Maybe it’s still really Sunday. Did I lose a day or a week somewhere, an unknown alter ego living my life while my conscience self takes a break?
It feels like some surreal dream. Did the Rapture or the Apocalypse come during the night unbeknownst to me and everyone’s gone? It is eerie and disturbing and the mind desperately grabs hold of anything that might restore your sense of this world as it’s supposed to be. I start looking at the calendar, what day is it?
It is something far more mundane. I am in fact not losing my sanity. Just another extreme reminder of the absentminded self absorption I sometimes live in. The one I subtly attribute to my mother while having to honestly admit I’m a far more extreme case.
It is in fact, Martin Luther King day…a holiday.
I immediately call my husband, relieved and mortified at the same time, so he can laugh at the ditzoid wife he long ago learned he was married too. Well cool, I think. Another day off. Maybe I can spend the time finishing my Arkansas story…since I was literally just lamenting about not having the kind of time I wish I had to write, to express all the damn thoughts and emotions that seem to flood in the mornings.
My cell phone rings. It is a work colleague, the HR manager. Hmm, maybe I’m not so self absorbed and absent minded as I thought. Or at least I’m not the only one. Is she surreally living in some post apocalyptic world today too, having forgotten it was a holiday?
I don’t answer it. It is a day off after all.