In Flight

Six hours until I go to the airport, she writes, and I'm drunk in bed with a man next to me. We spend the day writing, as she finally gathers her things in a bag, locks up the apartment, and flies to the ends of the earth. She sends pictures of the airplane, describes the last fluttering heartbeats before boarding. I sit in my dark office, exhausted by the season and the sleet and the life, and I let my imagination walk me alongside her all day. The frantic scramble to pack even though it is much too late to do it properly, the rush to the airport, the overwhelming desire to sleep and then the inability once airborne. To always have a ticket in your back pocket. The scratching of the itch. She sends me a few last kisses before the plane takes off, my companion through the dreary nights, my soldier in the alienated mine fields of growing old, my cheerleader in choosing the crooked paths. The weeks will be long in silence.

I turn to the computer. Print a boarding pass. Go through my apartment looking at things that would sparkle in Parisian dust. And beneath the frozen tundra of my skin, beneath the dead leaves of fall and the apathy of the season, a tiny ember begins to glow, a fragile seed begins to grow. Somewhere in the darkest corner of my heart, I tremble.

The spring will catch up with you at last, the itch shudder across your veins. The madness will stir your sleeping senses and you will remember the hopeless wanderer within.

You will remember you love her.
You would not have it, any other way.