As I sit on a plane and disinfect the tray table in front of me
Article by Esabella George Art by Isabella Hageman
I couldn’t tell you if this time my stream of consciousness will lead me to believe that this immediate bulging little life that is mine, in front of me, is taken advantage of. Or worse, I’m a medium drawing out heartbreak over the tray table in a million people’s quickly spent consumption. I know a thousand longing sentimentals held their breath and bit their tongues while gazing out the window, coasting and cruising at altitudes miles away and above the people who hurt them, who they still remain tethered to. And they did this before me. And now dramatic me feels like the first person to want someone to lead them, guide them– something that could make me sacrificial and a believer in something. This is what you get for being high in the sky, a place you were once taught held heaven or eternal life.
Ever since I put the thought into existence, I’ve been assuming that my chewing, crumbling, and misshapen scrunched napkins bring offense to where we left things. And how our “agreements” can seem really like an agreement, until you walk away and realize that all the things you were saying were in opposition to what you really wanted. At least she thinks we’re on the same page?
I cannot fathom fully how many people regard everyday objects as sacred. I keep infinite tabs on the things you have touched, given to me, and described that exist in my dorm room, my childhood room, my car.
I close my laptop. I rarely actually extract my laptop during a flight contrary to my prior ambitious intentions of two-plus hours of conscious alert uninterrupted time.
I wonder if my religious absence found a place somewhere else in me. I was never even plagued by it, the guilt of not partaking. But religion has a way of sneakily terrorizing you. Who else sporadically attended church with a friend whose family was vaguely? probably? trying to get them to join. It would be every once in a while, but I often finagled having myself over for sleepovers on Saturday nights specifically at the Garrett’s home. I knew I would be receiving some bizarre sense of hope the next morning, and I liked to feel a part of something. I also liked to think that Mr. and Mrs. Garrett thought they were helping me and wondered what I was thinking. I am not friends with Libby anymore. Those steeple moments are pillars embodying my clearest memories of her.
We have got to go back…but I don’t want to make your place too haunted, I think. I believe in ghosts and then I believe in you. This shadow of you possesses me everywhere I go; it’s like my own creation to fill the absence of God.
I’ve never been anything but someone else’s yet. I've heard about how we are all children of God before, and it would be so comforting to believe I belong to someone greater. Sadly, you control me, and I haven't returned to myself yet. No one can equip a dreamer and hopeless romantic enough to be ready to revert to the ways they were before a love completely dismantled them.
I extract a lot of irony in moments like this. Putting people on a pedestal, bizarrely more revolutionary than the popes and changemakers of past centuries:
Splitting the brunch bill with a guy whose family has owned oil shares since two centuries ago.
Getting to edit her job applications, being allowed into that realm of personhood. To learn something about someone in their most vulnerable and vacant place. A once blank page. It excited me how much she opened herself up to the beckoning negative spaces. I imagine the computer cursor flashing back and forth before her like a life flashing by when you’re simply trying to say, “Bye for now.”
Assortments of sacred moments repel me from trusting you.
Ritualistically, in my own form of therapy, I took the bait and made some suggestions, but I want you to know sweetest sweetness, I have no revisions. Whatsoever.
I would do it all over again, so why am I sketching erasing embellishing dwindling every message I write to give you the same generic “I hope all is going great.” Behind that screen is a trembling girl tired of not saying the right things. I ask for divine guidance in times like these. I ask for abrasive hope.
Tell me to come see you
Tell me you think about me in your future rooms like I do with you
Tell me you write my name in little corners of recycled notebooks
Tell me you think I’d like that song or book Ric recommended to you.
Give me another word that makes you flutter like those beetles you collaged for me.
I’ve got your handwriting on the back of a very large piece of paper in the bottom of one of my drawers. It’s not large enough, unfortunately, to vacate the empty void, the vessel of you in my soul.
When everyone is done, are you joining them too? It’s like the movement of the congregation: are you drawn to the crowds as well?
Your friend offered the two of us drugs one of the first times we were getting together, and I still see your skeptically encouraging smile every time I’m about to do something I probably shouldn’t. Your guidance got me into trouble, perhaps.
I want to write you a perfect sonnet and I need to know if one of those times you were ever laughing at me, not with me. I’m going crazy thinking about what you think about me.
Maybe someone could sink this ship for me, wave a hand over what’s left, but I know I’d just get right back into our wreckage full of denial at any time in any decade.
People have these rituals they allow to become sacred, like yoga in the morning, burning the toast just right, and I wouldn’t cross your mind even if I tried today!
I have always been envious of those believers, who do good knowing good is promised for all of their goodness and look forward to what comes next. They aren’t tormented by the passing of time nor humbled by that which gets away and doesn’t come back. You, for example, will perform as a ghost in the rest of my life. I remember describing seeing you again as catching a ghost in the flesh, feeling your limbs again, offering some new divinity from my acquired sixth sense.
The last time I saw you, one of those days, I had you in my room…with you and me again. It was nice, but it wasn’t the way that having a room with your first love again was supposed to feel. You insisted on helping me fix the drawers I put all my pants in. It was broken. I’m sorry, I really did not want you to fix it. You’re anything but a fixer to me, and knowing you wanted to put something back in place when the thing right in front of you, between me and you, was not being attended to. I think I would have broken the drawer again once you left. I do not want the reminder that you are selective and you can only fix some things.
I’m jealous because I could spend the rest of my life knowing the world doesn’t owe us some big huge reunion. We haven’t inherited some divine right to embrace again in an unearthly spherical realm, and so I am plagued with anxiety day to day.
It’s a sacred gift, I convince myself, to be able to think about someone to this degree.
I’ve made a habit of greeting you big when I’m feeling so small beside you.
And my two inches taller make me no greater than the mass of foreverness we left behind.
We had so many firsts and so few seconds. Numerically and in the grand scheme of the blip of my life, the start of my young adulthood. For now, I’m 21 and I want to be held by the 20-year-old you I met and looked up to.
When I entered the Apotheke the other day, the pharmacists watched me so closely that I felt their eyes burn into me as I perused. I have never known what I’m looking for, how could I tell them so? I could never tell you what I think I wanted. My unknowing and secrecy from the conscious self, a sacred gift that unwraps itself the longer we go on, letting the days of the years of our lives pass I predict so.
For this reason, God is time to me. I wrote something about it once.
“I used to make fun of my dad because he would say ‘the other day’ all the time
When referring to something that felt not so recent to me.
I realize that we’re just getting older and the passing of time could very well be the other day.
I want to sit on the summit of a mountain again and write back to my sister who was taking her ACTs
She told me when you’re reading this I’ll be a junior…
And I’m reminded of it like yesterday these years later.
It’s passing.
I’m screaming inside because my mom can’t remember to save her drafts.
The world isn’t made for these folks.
Us folks either.
You drive me crazy and I can’t depend on a template.
Let you let go.”
…
“The plane was landing more rapidly than I was used to
But I stared out the window strongly
And didn’t think about the voice over us all.
I thought about you receiving the news
And I didn’t even quiver.
I guess all in all I want to be grieved
Like I grieve for you.
My dying thought would be I’m sorry it happened to me.
I wish the stupid lights in this plane would turn off
The cricket sounds in “Green Arrow” aren’t helping, they’re almost epilogue-esque (a eulogy)
We remain confused by the direction the buses of our future will go
And worry about train delays and faulty time frames
While we envision a possibility of the same roof containing our multitudes
The Ides of March were approaching
I don’t recall being stabbed in the back
Yet fear is forthcoming
Every March appears to be harmonious
Like our last one.
And you’ll be 23 this time around
And I’ll be listening for the trumpets.
A peacefully provoking person
Unintentional character manipulation
I’ve lost a lot of kindness
Appeasing yours
I won’t consider time to have been lost
When I inevitably glance back
But stolen
Nobody wants to be reminded how foolishly they reached into their pockets to spend time
But really we coaxed those fears in each other
Everybody wants to be the person that the person who loves them thinks they are.
So my time was well spent being loved and a lie at the same time.
And what’s been stolen we don’t have to talk about
Time
You’re no kleptomaniac
Though you’ve stood on stolen ground longer than me in these lifetimes.”