Take Two
Here I am, 41,000 feet in the air. I am approaching America’s airspace, cruising somewhere above Kapukasing at a rate of about 14km per minute. I have come about 15,264 kilometers, I have 1,448 to go. In about two hours I will bump gently back in New York, and then we will see.
A guy is drunk behind me. He’s gone hard on the free airplane wine. He told me, in a slur, that he wanted to make the flight worth it. I envy him, briefly, his throughline from cause to consequence, the neat solution of it all. He’s snoring now, a low, consistent rumble, blissfully soaked in booze. How much wine do you have to drink to make the last year worth it?
The last month in Singapore went by so quick. I don’t even remember that much of it, lost in a blur of board games, laughter, and surprised tears. Every time I do the math I’m surprised at how the last 18 months have accrued in both momentum and intensity. The first time I left, it wasn’t this hard. The first time I left, I was bright and shiny and optimistic and ambitious, all the things that add up together to a kind of hardness that isn’t unlike being brittle.
The clouds are furring gently outside, like the broad surface of worn, loved jeans.
I’ve bought wifi for the flight, both because it’s cheap and because I was in the middle of a couple of conversations that’d been temporarily interrupted by takeoff, conversations I wanted to continue. But now all my friends have schlepped off to sleep, and I’m left talking to strangers on Instagram. The question that keeps coming up is one that I don’t want to answer. How does it feel, to return? What are you going for? What do you want from this?
The truth is that I don’t know. It’s a truth that will coalesce into something else once I settle back into life on the ground, but suspended in the interim, I don’t know, and don’t want to know. The truth is that my return is a re-entry into the gamble I made back when I believed in the formulaic equation of risk and diligence threading a straight line towards reward. The stakes have shifted, both because and in spite of the global pandemic, in its occurrence and our response. It’s easy to say that the past year was nobody’s fault, but isn’t it? Just a little bit? All of our faults, too?
Here’s another truth: it would have been easy to stay. To struggle through my last year at Columbia online, file the same complaints that would be met with the commiserations of other pandemic beings, to swaddle myself in the home of people and comfort which has become so large, and so essential this last year. To cut my losses early, wrap up the last bit of naïveté, and stave off the financial wound that’s bled for much of the last couple of years, from way back when I first upped and left, before the excuse of the pandemic interrupted us all. To dream, in 2019, had been charming, now it carries the unmistakable tinge of hard-headed stupidity.
In 2019, when I’d first received acceptance to Columbia’s MFA (for a staggering amount of money), a friend, far more clued in than I was about the profit-driving machine that is American graduate school, looked at the bill and said: You don’t have to go.
His concern, so pragmatic and kind, confirmed it for me: I have to.
This time, at lunch a month before my departure, he repeats: You don’t have to go.
I know.
Barely over an hour to go. It’s negative 52 degrees outside. I’m watching ice crystals try, and fail, to form. A little cluster has succeeded though, gathered at the bottom curve of the airplane window. From where I’m sitting, it looks like a splinter in the glass. Something that might give in to the difference in pressure between this world and that, anytime. The sunrise comes, and goes, it’s beautiful, in the obvious way a memory is. The compulsion to see things through till the end can be a curse, I think. It keeps you trained on one path, and when that path fractures, then what? I turn away, exhausted by metaphor, by my own inability to just let things be.
But daylight is filtering in from the windows on the other side of the plane, too. It arrests the dust particles in the air, which shimmer and twist and dance in a through, straight line towards me. Behind me, the drunk guy burps gently, and sleeps through it all.
