Dear Future - Lynx

Dear Future
by Mark Anderson

I'm sorry.
I'm sorry I lied

and I'm sorry I yelled.
I won't say

you know I love you
because you already know

that when we meet again
I'll have no choice

but to loosen my tie.

Lynx
by Michael Herman

The cover of the brochure in my hand had a lynx on it. The lynx was made more ridiculous by wearing sunglasses. "A Better Life Awaits” read the text along the bottom. And the only thing I could think was I wished it were true. I opened the brochure and flipped to the first panel.

“Welcome,” it read. “We’re pleased to have you as our guest.”

I rolled my eyes and moved on. I remain skeptical to this day of someone who refers to you as a “guest” after charging twenty-two hundred dollars to your credit card. It’s on par, in my book, with restaurants which advertise down-home cookin’. It’s an obvious marker something is bound to not add up.

“Here at the Foggy Meadows,” it continued. “We value you as a customer and are grateful you chose to stay with us. We know you have options on where to seek treatment and strive to meet your highest level of satisfaction on this and every return visit.”

I’d read these platitudes often and in other waiting rooms. Not these exact lines but some variation of which said essentially the same thing. After the usual assurance that if I needed anything during my stay I could phone up the CEO and he’d get right on it, I flipped to the back of the brochure and looked to the very bottom.

“Printed 9/2001. Re-order #4861-2”

That line itself was more telling than anything contained in the rest of the brochure. I knew this type of place having patronized a few in the intervening years. They’d all seen a surge around the time irony died and a new seriousness was born with business booming right up until the moment the people got tired of being serious and went back to wanting others to do it for them. This place had, sure as I can be, been just like the others and printed too many brochures assuming incorrectly things really had changed.

It was at this moment a woman emerged from the back and showed me through the door and into another room where I could wait in privacy. I’d been through the procedure before and this was just one of its many now-familiar steps. I could forsee how things would go from this point forward.

As I set the brochure in the trash can, I looked again at the majestic and powerful beast on its cover. I knew from a report I’d done in fifth grade it was a lynx, not a bobcat. I studied it and thought about what the designer had thought about bringing the big cat together with cool shades.

See, the lynx represented the world as we find it. Using something like a bear or a lion would’ve had too much attachment to previous uses and, perhaps being an animal connoisseur themselves, the designer wanted something which created a new association much akin to the one you the consumer were seeking.

The glasses were there because the designer sought out the familiar. Sunglasses have been shorthand for cool going back almost seventy years now. Its placement on the nose of thed lynx represents desire by mankind to see ourselves in the world as we find it. Animals do not actually wear sunglasses in the wild and yet they might if they had the chance.

Bringing the two together is what places like Foggy Meadows wanted to do. Big promises are made by people who don’t know the names of all the people who work for them and then you are left to fend for yourself. The industry wanted to bring you into the world so you could find yourself in it. And they felt they succeeded because there you were, in it.

I turned my mind away from the trash can, leaving the thought of the brochure with the physical reminder and onto anticipating what came next. I thought about when I would leave the facility how I would go from there to the bus, to a train and to a short walk to my home. I would have something to eat, watch a little television and get into bed. The next morning I would awake, shower and go to work. Then three or four months later, whenever I had again collected the necessary fund, I would be back in another waiting room and holding another similar brochure to the one with the lynx.

Because though I knew I would be disappointed by my stay, I believed this time I actually might not.