The coffee isn't strong but it is loud. I thought my days would be tangled up with the wingspan of a passenger plane -- that somehow my body through space would be dragged along after it (my plane, my seat, my face, my name) as if a rope, 3,000 miles long, was tied around my waist and the slack keeps lessening and lessening, like gasps of breath in a hospital gown, watching your own heart monitor palpitate irregularly and beyond your cognitive control and then half of your face is stuck in a grimace when some dull tumor messes with the wiring in yer infinitely forgiving brain. Oh New Mexico! Oh travel agency, the family clinic and the hand built home, oh the collie dogs running through the back yard, the rough play and the wax glazed eyes and the biting black mop fiend of a service dog...
It is more like a small piece of thread somehow caught up in the landing gear at take off, unraveling, unraveling, revealing my skin in small motions. I wonder where my sky carriage is at this moment? What fields of flowers is it casting a temporary shadow over. There is a pilot dreaming of a good hot spring hike through the Andes (if this dream exists, he cares not). To be a commercial pilot, flying 10 hours a day, your schedule must be flexible and you must enjoy to sleep single nights in single beds or in bunks with the flight staff each night in foreign countries, perhaps never explored in greater depth by you or yours. I imagine this airplane. This series of airplanes considering connections. How much fuel will they use in between this moment and when I climb through the aisles, clambering to my seat impatient to glue my face to the cell window and watch the world spin by from a discrete spot above. All clouds like a paradise arranged in singular puffs and then disappearing. I imagine the thoughts I will have in this plane. Alone. Over the country to Houston. (What geographic sights!) And then, alone, over the Atlantic in the aisle to sleep, sleep, dream and sleep. I sure do hope. Or write in a frantic scrawl the first few chapters of the story.... of the adventure as a whole entity.
