We talked a little about what I was doing. She remembered truck driving. I told her about New York. Felt like drunk uncle Ted big time. Had labored conversation about hurricane Sandy and megabus. Labored for me, only seemed to belabor her in that I think she was re-adjusting to act around a belabored person. Remembered my last visit when she asked me if there were complications in my abortion in a medical conversational protocol way, and I described fainting and the blood loss and she asked why I didn’t go to the hospital and I started crying unexpectedly and had to stop talking for a moment, then said ‘oh god I’m so sorry I don’t know why I’m like this.’ She seemed befuddled and refused my apology in a kind goal-oriented way. Her face listening to me talk about New York looked similar to how it looked then. She asked me if I was taking the bus to New York and I said I drove. Her face lit up a little. She said ‘have you tried megabus?’ I lied and said ‘bolt…bus. Megabus just drops you off in white marsh, right?’ she told me about how she and her family saved money booking in advance on the megabus. Felt comforted to hear this, for some reason, I kept asking her questions. I’ve taken the megabus probably over 50 times. It felt good to hear her talk about what the bus was like and how it surpassed her expectations. She said she didn’t care about luxury, she just wanted to be comfortable. I thought ‘how long can we keep this up, I want to know more about her riding the bus, where she was going,’ but then it seemed like I was asking too many bus questions and she was aware of talking a lot. Somehow the conversation wound down. Have an image of my face looking like it’s about to say something it’s thought about, then the conversation taking an abrupt ‘winding down’ turn. She started to say goodbye. I said, ‘oh, wait, so before I go, can you say how does it look? Compared to last time?’ She closed her eyes and did a single nod and said ‘to me, from what I saw today, from this medical examination, you are completely normal. There are no lesions, you look perfect. But we will have to see in a year.’ She wished me a good year. I said ‘you too, dr. Abrams,’ feeling weird about hearing myself say her name in that context, then doing something loud to the door as I closed it.

Laura was smiling big at me, like Christmas style, a little sad, and said ‘bye bye Meg.’ I felt ‘caught’ by her smile like I felt ‘caught’ about the megabus, wanted to prolong. I said something about my co-pay. Laura said ‘we’ll just run it through the insurance company like normal,’ still smiling, seeming ‘onto me,’ my swindling her into a co-pay response to prolong her smiling at me. My awareness of the ‘swindling’ as I was doing it seemed limited to a vague feeling that I was doing something automatically. Now seems obvious, what I was doing and why.