Unforgiven

Slanted sunlight across the terminal, your jetlagged and sleep addled brain reads sunrise into the soft tones and you have time to think how maybe your fear of the dark is exaggerated. But your clock adjusts to local time and sees the low hanging sun in a new light when it turns to midday. This is the North.

Clean lines in the terminal, your bones settle in clean design and long slender bodies; this is how you were made. Everything is made to look light, everything is only trying to endure the unlivable. I sit next to a man on the plane who prepares to move back to America, after 27 years away. Then one day I just felt like it was time to go back. It was time to go home. He had bought a house down the road from where he grew up. I guess it's just in you, he said, and I had no idea what he meant.

Because this light is in me, this perpetually dying, agonizing winter light sits in me and still I do not belong in it. Because in the far west there is a mountain range that can breathe in my lungs but I can never live at its foot again. Instead my soul calls home a dirty, noisy, ridiculous island at the center of the world, and my bones have cracked to fit its mold.

It is no wonder, I know, that airports are so comforting.
For a short moment, you can make believe, that you are only on your way home.
For a short moment, you can make believe,
that you have one.