Hyperventilating

And waited.

I had already lied to Lek once about my Visa app being in transit via FedEx to my expeditor and the Embassy beyond. I did it for her own well being. I knew that her bad experience had led to an especially rabid distrust of the goings-on behind the closed doors of the Embassy and of the Visa minions inside. So, when she pinged me to ask "sent the Visa app off?" I hardly thought at all before responding "yes". No need for anyone else to be hyperventilating over the delay in completing and sending the application.

There were obvious clues that I had lied. Had Lek been paying attention to my response she would have known that something was a little off.

As a person whose natural tendencies and job mandates asking "what does 'yes' mean in this context?", my response to simple questions sometimes get a little long, not because I have so much to say; I don't. I usually give the actual answer in bullet points because I think the average corporate worker and friend is so over-committed that he doesn't have the attention span for more than a sound byte. Yet I also want the listener to have full contextual understanding of the answer and how it was reached. So that there will be reduced confusion and few subsequent questions.

Lek was perhaps so relieved of that the application was safely in the hands of FedEx that she didn't even notice that she'd never gotten a one-word answer from me in all the time we've known each other.

And so I was the only person in the entire world hyperventilating over my again-delayed Visa. Which is a pretty lonely place to be. Just me and my brown paper bag.