An Interview I Remembered Forward

I nearly cancelled the interview; I was under-qualified on paper and knew it. What happened instead is the reason I hold my current job.

The deja vu began in the waiting area and never lifted. Not flickering — continuous, like watching a film I had seen once, long ago, drunk: each scene unfamiliar until it started, then instantly known. The receptionist offering water and apologising for the warm room: known as she said it. The panel of two, not three, because 'our colleague is stuck on a train': I mouthed 'train' along with the apology, behind my folder.

The questions unspooled the same way. Each one, as the interviewer drew breath, arrived in my head a half-second early — not as text, but as the memory of having been asked. And with each came the memory of my own answer, and — this was the strange gift of it — the memory of where each answer had been weak. I had, in whatever previous iteration my head was replaying, rambled disastrously on the third question. This time I felt the ramble coming like a pothole and steered around it.