WAVES
my father is a pilot. he took me flying before i could walk properly &, as a child, i had many plastic airplanes i flew daily on imagination. my family traveled often & i always loved the flights deeply. then one nite in the mid-1990s, midflight, while taking the red eye from honolulu to minneapolis, it occured to me that the magic of flying was simply air pressure. a minor panic attack on a heavy plane full of sleeping tourists followed. i didn’t think much of it.
i returned to hawai’i w/my father in 1999 for an extended trip upon graduating from high school. after an uneasy flight, we got to our hotel room only to learn that my father’s best friend & flying buddy had died in a crash earlier that day. air pressure? what a joke to balance across the pacific. flying has never been the same in my mind. minneapolis to boston, portland to new york, san francisco to rome… it’s always the same silent fight in my head. upon landing, sometimes i feel like i brought the plane to a different part of the world on sheer will alone. it’s exhausting.
this trip was no different. on the cross-pacific jetliner, to distract from the bumps of differing air pressures that send my stomach to floors i didn’t know existed, i watched the massive waves 30 thousand feet below. & those waves became a mantra… we are only waves. the ocean can collapse & explode in a salty froth all it wants, but we are only traveling through it as a medium. the cells that compose my body are COMPLETELY different than they were last year or any of the years before. yet here I am, a candle of worry traveling several hundred miles an hour above the clouds.
we are removed from everything that describes us. let’s not forget.
