Tele...

Staring, drawn out of the confines of her retail bean fields into the sparkly realm of her mind, she doesn't realize she has also caught the eye of Shiri Appleby, whose name sounds as sweet and tart as her girl-next-door image is saccharine, and who now has the look of someone unsure if the girl staring is fan or foe. Staring as she does at old photos, examining every line and fleck of light as if transported by the minute details of the memory back into time where the memory was born, she realizes it is not a picture and it is not her imagination - that tiny, plain girl - no - woman, is in fact Shiri. Saved by the ringtone of her mobile, Shiri answers, "Hey babe..." Liz Parker would never say that to Max, but, yes - that is in fact, Liz Parker's voice, the slightly squeezed consonants, a soft scruffy baby woman voice. She stares also out of disbelief at the lucky synchronicity she's been gifted: See, for two weeks she has watched episodes of Roswell on her computer, suffering slow buffering - before the availability of Netflix, mind you - she really wanted to watch Roswell right then, and right at that moment even though it hasn't been on TV since the Y2K days (which is what she calls the millennia era, the aughts), the days when aliens and tech nerds were in vogue and she salved her pangs for true love by living through Liz Parker and Max Evans, rooting for taboo of the third kind. Did the gush of this memory of a show she loved so hard manifest to this? She couldn't believe it. 'No way - not again,' she thought, 'maybe next week I'll see Max.' Her eyebrow raising, she finally looked away. When she'd think of an episode she loved, a movie she'd like to see again - no matter how obscure or commonplace, or whatever happened to the girl who played that one girl...,like a question dutifully answered, she'd see them on TV or if there's enough juice - in front of her like Liz/Shiri was now.  Why do I keep seeing Kyle MacLachlan, then - I've never even seen Dune?  Her busy-bodied coworker who has been staring at her unbeknownst to her - again - buzzed closer to her. A buzzkill. And she made a deft return to earth and she felt like lead again where she stood in the retail bean field, surrounded by swirls of people she hadn't seen kiss aliens, and not sure what a gift for channeling such things could ever help her to do.

Liz Parker/Shiri

photo by the CW Network.