by Sean Murphy.
I am born just before the cab arrives. Freshly showered and full of life, I crawl in back, buckled up for the big excursion. I make my first attempts at speech en route to the airport, babbling at the buildings as they approach and recede from both sides. I pay the price, then learn to walk, one step after the next, all the way through security. Occasional tantrums ensue as I learn about delayed gratification, bodily functions, smells, and the mixed blessing of other people. The shuttle to the terminal is like adolescence, moving quickly but seemingly going nowhere. More lessons learned along the way; an entire secondary school of baggage, anxiety, ugliness, expectation, and disappointment. By the time my feet find their way—following eyes that translate signs that signal a brain already constrained by this body—to the departing gate, adulthood awaits, impatient yet somehow sluggish in ways I can’t fully grasp. Every pretty, unattractive, or indifferent face going in the opposite direction is a succession of first dates, marriages, divorces, reminders, or illusions. Unaccompanied, I jostle for position amongst others competing to get to the same place. After a series of delays disguised as jobs applied or fired from, I ready myself for retirement. Stepping unsteadily down the aisle, I realize I’m childless and forgot to have fun (enjoy the ride, someone might have said): too many fights, forgotten promises, and bad habits to begin again, no way of reconciling chances lost and paths not chosen. Decades of trepidation cut with confidence and cowardice—the cream and sugar in an otherwise unlimited cup of straight, dark pain—ricochet somewhere deep inside, like movie previews in an invented language or books read backwards: nightmares of tests never taken, money saved and spent, a billion bowel movements and all the food that fueled them, drinking deeply from a well filled with sand. Exhausted yet restless, I find my assigned seat, like everybody else, and settle in for the final moments, an imploding epiphany involving déjà vu and suspicion, as close to honest as anyone ever gets. Sweat (or tears) pour from pockets of dread no cocktail can assuage, but I pray it’s okay and will all be over soon. The Captain speaks and I can’t help but hope he’s God, the inscrutable architect who designed all this, giving orders in His impossible travel agency. Flight attendants go through the motions and no one makes eye contact, as agreed upon in advance. In those final seconds, braced, breathless, hoping for anything but the worst, I finally figure it all out, but I’m already losing each image as soon as it appears. No words, no light, nothing more to wait for. Finally, there’s a flash and the sound of so many spirits ascending into ever after…up and away I rest, at last, in peace.