"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)