weird conversation

I'm in the middle of a somewhat weird night shift. I had a former guest come in, a woman who, by all signs, might be having a schizophrenic episode or might be trippin' out on some weird chemicals. At any rate, she said a bunch of crazy things which I'd like to write down to show you how crazy they are, but I can't remember even half of them.

This always happens to me. I've had conversations like this before, both with mentally ill people and with people on drugs and with people who were mentally ill AND on drugs. Afterwards I can usually only remember the feeling I had during the conversation, at witnessing something so off-the-wall that it's funny and tragic and spooky, but I can't remember any of the actual content because it's so random and disjointed that it doesn't connect to anything meaningful in my mind that can be recalled. I always laugh at those movies where someone receives a panicked phone call with some intricate information, or nonsense gibberish, or a sentence in a foreign language, and can later recall the exact content of that conversation and follow the lead to solve a mystery or whatever. If it's Jason Bourne or Rainman I'll buy it, but an average schmoe? Conversations like that leave us so lost that we can't even remember five seconds later what was just said, let alone spend an entire movie tracking down the clues that we somehow still recall from such a context.

But man, this conversation was like a weird dream (which I usually can't fully remember either). She was talking about people and their doubles. She told me that she had just seen someone who looked just like me. Then she saw a random guest walk by and told him with fascination and surprise that she had just seen someone who looked exactly like him. Then she asked me how L---- was doing, but clarified that she doesn't mean the L----- who looks exactly like the L----- that we know, but with a somewhat smaller mouth. Then she told me that she had been in some warehouse that used to be a monastery, and there was a poster there of Bruce Lee and his double, and that something like that could sell for a lot of money.

But I can't remember all the rest of the conversation. She switched languages on me constantly, going from Spanish to Dutch to English. She asked me if I know who stole her Bible. She wanted to know if it would be possible to hide someone's will inside a watch, along with a child's footprint.

Yes. Whoa.

The part that really made my hair stand on end was when she asked me, "what do you think of someone raising a child in a room that is completely red? Red walls, red carpet, red sheets, red ceiling? And if it's not even their own child, if it's a child that they abducted?"

Don't do drugs, kids.