Smile

It’s eight a.m. I just called the Human Rights Watch to try and interview someone there about an upcoming immigrant rights summit, but the office doesn’t open until nine so I got the main voicemail. I listened to the patient, fresh-voiced recording of the receptionist as she carefully listed each name and extension, and I remembered sitting at the front desk of various offices, recording and re-recording that message until finally I could get through it without any mistakes. And then I think about what I am doing today — immigrant rights article, job interview, research, negotiating a payment method with three different editors — and what I would have been doing in that other life, and this Joker-sized smile is only partly to do with my coffee kicking in.