Kentucky by air

I am not a fearful flyer, I can generally amuse myself by sleeping, perchance dreaming, reading, listening to music and looking out the window. I generally avoid conversation with my seatmates unless it is a short flight, or unless the conversation seems particularly agreeable. From Santa Barbara to Salt Lake city was, however, not good. We rose through the cold grey morning without incident (usually the part that most worries me, as I was once informed while sunning myself on Culebra island, not far from Vieques and debating taking a quick flight back to San Juan, that it is the most dangerous part of the flight in which most engine failure crashes occur). I forgot to be worried. But somewhere about an hour into the flight I awoke with a start, disoriented because I felt like I had slept much longer than I actually had, to see below me a vast ocean-like lake, which wasn't apparently the great Salt Lake and left me scratching my head in wonderment. Smooth sailing continued until our descent, through which we tore into a thousand clouds (and not of peace). The miniature plane which looked more and more like a toy model, wobbled precariously from side to side as if it were a mobile on a child's string and was being abused quite vigorously. My stomach lurched. I thanked myself for not eating, and my fingers grasped at the air, at nothing, looking for comfort. We dropped again, as if the carpet had been pulled out from underneath us, my stomach followed immediate suit, and I began to look around, hoping that my child would be cared for when I died, applauding myself for telling people that I loved them recently and not crashing to my grave having never shared. If I were relligious I might have started praying, I made a note to myself, become religious, there is a reason people give over their responsibility to some nameless faceless thing that they impute to be larger than they. We pitch forward at what looks like a 45 degree angle, and I grasp at air again. No one is there next to me to hold my hand. I think of the Indigo Girls and the song about fear of flying that accompanied me on many trips, some across the ocean, like the summer that I studiously ignored my mother and my tía Loli laying on my back in all my teenage angst in the rear of the car, as we toodled, three "girls" all over la Mancha, and points south. I think about Sinead O'Connor's song, "this is the last day of our acquaintance...." the melody reverberates, and pulls at those weak points in my seams, "I know you don't love me anymore/ you used to hold my hand when the plane took off" and I don't know if I am sad for myself or for somebody else or just afraid of my very present mortality. And I think about the last time I flew, in December, with I. doodling away in one of her notebooks as I engaged in a serious discussion about adultery with an Argentine-Italian man who claimed that his wife would never cheat on him despite his being gone for 6 months to a year at a time and having a collection of "minas" scattered about (I still think that he was hoping for me to take his bait, but I refused to even entertain the idea, mostly because I was repulsed by the hair that proliferated from his nostrils and out of the top of his slightly unbuttoned shirt, but also for other reasons). As my hands made that very same urgent reach for something, slipping on thin air, he teased me about being afraid. I usually don't like being teased, but in some people it can be forgiven, and strangely, there was a gentleness in the teasing. Maybe, I think, that I only don't like being teased about things that I think I should not feel, but I am not ashamed of being afraid. Not ashamed of not wanting to be alone either. So I am remembering this pibe who was really too old to be called that at all, being close to twice my age (which isn't necessarily a deterrant, but we have previously established his reasons for being one) and thinking that right now, right now it would be enough to just have a hand to hold. One that knew what it meant to hold itself out in comfort. And I thought about this story that I am ruminating on, the one that I promised myself a long time ago, and that I promised someone else that I would try to write (he knows I'll fail, but I'll try) and to Agustín who unknowingly planted that seed years ago when I read (one of) his book(s), and who recently reminded me of it because he stumbled upon me here in this virtual ether that eternally expands.

So I close my eyes, and when we land, still wobbling from side to side, enveloped in fluffy wet clouds that chill the air and hang on my bones when I later march quickly across the tarmac to the terminal, the woman next to me, a seemingly put-together lady of leisure, rubs her temples and laments, "God I am hung over" and I smile and for the three minutes prior to deplaning we talk, it is small talk, of insignificance, but it grounds me once again, and I don't think I'll die today even though I do think I will be sick. And I am, much later, alone in my hotel room.

Salt Lake to Cincinatti I had more room to move about, but then, at the last minute there was an obese woman, very sweet, and nervous who asked the neighboring football recruitees (this is what I gathered from the do-rags, black NY baseball cap, haughty tone and blatant disregard for the authority of the frail little stewardess, and of course the unending dialogue about teams and recruiters... my powers of observation are astounding at times) if she could look at the big fat gold ring on his finger. And I laughed inwardly, and tried to be nice as she kept asking how things worked (I think she may have never flown before) and I wondered how she could possibly fit in the seat, but she managed, squishing her bulk in one direction to have it pop out in others. I showed her how to use the headphones, and set the channel, and then, when I had finally, finally felt like I had done the last of my neighborly duties and had drifted off to sleep, listening to my iPod and ignoring the pain that it causes my mishapen ears, she woke me up! 20 minutes before landing to tell me we were starting to land. I think I hid my irritation well, or perhaps I just looked out the windown and thanked myself that there was not nearly as much turbulence as at the start of the flight when we had small flakes sticking to the windows and immediately melting forming patterns of meaningless streams, or maybe meaningul, if I knew how to interpret them. Maybe they were letters, messages from God scribbled on the window telling me not to be afraid, but I don't know how to listen to that sort of thing, or interpret, and so I am alone, peering out the window, and I am surprised as we descend on Cincinatti/ Northern Kentucky to see that there is nothing but fields of green and large, well-planned and yet painfully prosaic developments of houses. Large houses, mind you, large enough to comply with the American dream of ostentation and leisurely living, all different (which was a surprise, but all laid out in straight, neat little lines that ended in a circular terminal, a nerve ending, with five houses radiating out from each little cul-de-sac as if I were staring down at some giant circuit board. And I smiled to myself, and wondered if at some point, years, hundreds and thousands of years from now, if this planet hasn't self-destructed by then, or even if it has, galactic pieces of it spewed across the universe for some other intelligent body to absorb, ponder, reconstruct, will they see how our "art" reflected our cosmo-vision? Copmuter chips, large-scale circuit boards, pristine developments in orderly little patterns, out into infinity.

Now there is a thought.