"Since when did our personal problems become public discusion?!"

("Since you started considering me the problem, and stopped being someone I could talk to.")

How did it get to be October anyway? It isn't that time is flying, it's more like I'm flying head first through the days. And in the mean time, the reality of my life has converted to virtual, and the digital age is our heartless/brainless/unwilling accomplice. It's been exactly 2 months now, and so far somehow we're still holding on, aren't we?

This evening my plane will land onto a journey of 2 more hours of public transport before I make it home. Meanwhile, I imagine you're standing perfectly straight, but itchy in the rented linen of a groomsman's tux. After the succinct choreography of the outdated ceremony, I hope you can now revel in being gosh-darn done with a good deed, and maybe even drink a bit in the goodly company of the sweet folks we befriended yesterday--who will be joining you even as I cannot. And all the while I'll continue the journey back to my adopted home: mercilessly far from you, but mercifully lacking in absent memories of the us we used to be, and have.

I told you while we drove together--top down, basking in my father's mustang's borrowed freedom--that if you decided that we should see other people, keeping in touch all the same, that I would be at a disadvantage. I tried with all the articulation I had in me, (whatever was willing and able to be mustered at my beckoning,) to explain to you that the difference between being jealous and not, (and I mean real jealousy here, the knee-jerk, pure bodily kind,) seems to lie in the visualization of your lover's other choice (of lovers). To you, anyone I might meet would be a stranger; for me, there'd be a damn good chance you would fall into the company of a woman I already know--or at least know of. And i know it's similar to the way that you are still living there, while I'm safe in a brand new place. How you're in proximity to the places we loved so well together, littered as they are with our own sweetly shared experience. But the other side of that sharp-ridged coin says that I will suffer the same cruel familiarity if you let yourself love someone i could see whenever i close my eyes--knowing both that she wasn't me (hard enough), but also that she was her, and still managed to take my place.

I shudder at the thought, and hope truly that your being where we once were is not a pain to you, but rather an occasional relief, in that we have christened those places you still haunt, home--in ways that are secret to anyone else--and with a warmth that my present life lacks completely. Like everything, these swords have but two opportunities (not) to sever so cleanly.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (10/11/09)

"And other things..."

...like what if my brother's plane were to crash, now that I've convinced him to come? Spur of the moment, on the eve of his very first child, already loved more than I realized an unborn soul could be. What if I were the proximate cause of that tragedy? AND had to live to see what it did to our sweet grandmother, who we're all flying out to see? (The old woman doesn't even know we're on our way--she never would have asked us to come, let alone expected that we would...she probably wouldn't even have allowed it, had she known. And if we don't make it, good lord forbid!, I hope with everything in me that nobody ever tells her. How utterly ridiculous that would be!)

Then, that final little nothing, which could suddenly swallow a survivor up with its difficult, nihilistic summons: what about all of my stuff? My stupid, absurd, mountain of STUFF!? And my beautiful dog; and my reliant roommate; and my unfinished plan; and my abandoned school; and my bills & purple truck? All of it's stacked suddenly without keeper on the other side of the country, forever waiting for me to come home. Because if I don't, it all scatters--I'm the glue that brought & holds all of it together. But someone else will have to go there to collect, divvy up, discard & keep track of so many things which are utterly without meaning, without me. Without history, once their record keeper is lost. None of it's valuable (to anyone else)--and yet it would need to be "handled" by somebody. Who would take on that burden? My mother? My dad? Would i have him bury his mother and daughter--both born and dead in the same month of different years--on a whim? To God, the universe, and EVERYTHING, I ask that the answer to that last question is 'no'.

Because it's true. Besides all of these negative reasons not to crash, the positive one is simply the sweet fact that i still need to be alive. I love life, and mine entirely/especially. (Even when I'm beating my body with a pillow of exhaustion, all the live long day! :-)

I saw a woman on the train this morning, maybe my age, sitting abreast a stroller and cooing earnestly to the content baby boy slowly staring around him. (A little 'stare bear' indeed...) His mother couldn't seem to stop touching him--his cheeks here; his foot in the miniature sneaker there; adjusting and re-adjusting his sleeves, blanket, jacket, knit cap; pushing his stroller out, then rolling it back in again, unlocking and locking it in place. At one point, she leaned over to put her face right near his and kissed his nose, (startling him only slightly as he took all of it swiftly in stride,) whispering words on her breath to the effect of: "I love you more than life itself. You know that, baby? I love you so, so much..." And another little kiss to brush his cheek, unbelievably soft--as much her kiss as his skin.

And i thought of them--not dead at all, like the rest of this morbid monologue. But alive. Very much alive, and living for years and years. I projected them into the future: in ten years they'd be about 35 and 11...another ten, 45 and 21...and maybe then a new cycling life would come into play, soon thereafter. Like a child of mine one day--how I , too, would fly that child across the nation with a hardly a day's notice, were I to be sitting gently with my dad on his deathbed. So these two, mother and son, now forever a part of each other's lifetimes.

And how beautiful that is--and impossible to truly imagine, if still somehow the easiest thing to believe. The natural simplicity of such cycles, even as i artificially look at them from outside, because of course I never could be (separate).

Even here, sitting on the same plane--still awaiting take-off almost half an hour later. I am listening again to the mantra of how the 'software issues' the pilot has been having are not resolved, but will be ignored for the sake of going forward. Yet I'm not scared in the slightest--even while the children in first class scream heartily for several minutes at a time, perhaps feeling the risks everybody convinces themselves that they aren't taking. After going on & on about pummeling aircrafts bringing unthinkable tragedy, it's hard to explain why I'm not worried now...actually, I feel more like that lovely little boy: ready to take it all in stride, since there's no choice in the matter anyhow.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (10/9/09)

There are ROCKING CHAIRS in the Charlotte, NC airport!!

(White ones, in fact.) The whole sprawling thing is a shopping mall, being circled by low-flying aircraft. It's a dizzy ballet, but the Bally's around the bend will keep you fit in body if the five Starbucks will take care of your soul. (Wow, this is already sounding kinda dark...)

But I'll knock it off. I only have things to be grateful for, even if they sometimes exhaust me. See six hours ago: I'm sitting on a plane in North Carolina, waiting for my layover to come to its un-intrusive end. The floatation seat cushions are looking very much attached, and it's another reason why I hope we don't crash. But the real reasons would shame me to my core, so tiny and unnoticeable they are, (just) before departure.

I'm thinking of the reason for this trip--to see my tiny grandma sleep peacefully upon her death bed. My presence merely waiting, on the off-chance that she wakes up--maybe wants to say hullo. I worry about how horrible she'd feel if my flight doesn't make it where it's supposed to be going, but crumbles like seasoned croutons on its way over Memphis, instead. Why so pointless a thing is possible, I have no idea. But I pray I don't become the bearer of the blame for that guilt that would grow inside her--or the anger--there on the door-step of eternity where today she talks freely to God.

"And other things..." (Which I'm determined to come back to later!, but at a decent-er hour.)

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (10/8/09)