London/Pt.1

I love airports, but I’ve never liked flying. This year is starting with new experiences, like my first time panic landing, staring down the aisle with the immediate urgency to vacate my seat, space, skin. Gravity became a kaleidoscope weighing down, spinning ground to distort those previously adorned tones of warm color to cold confusion and switching the location of every bone in your body on a whim. It hurt like some stolen thing you only know in reflection, words you didn’t know you needed to say when they mattered—the realization that the last time you saw your grandfather was the last time you would see your grandfather and you didn’t get to prepare a self-sure elegy confirming his belief that when we leave we are gone. I wonder how he would feel if I told him about the dream I had where his spirit lived in a bush with sentient flowers that knew me from a distance and sang in hymns that made the air glow. Return to earth, grounded, still staring down the aisle remembering all the reasons why I didn’t want to be on this trip.

I’m outrunning myself. Curled to the interior of a train southbound to London, suitcase, backpack, empty seat at my side. The Atlantic grey is a heavy coat making me nauseous, creeping with fog knuckled fingers around my throat demanding a breathy sacrifice while that atmospheric crown adorns the countryside. A father and son sit across the aisle sharing snacks from a plastic bag, this is their space. This is the ritual of fatherhood, and I should only know it in observation. The last three years have seen fathers falling all around me, and though their numbers remain confident, I am nursing scars that like to bite back often in public spaces. Three mothers board with three babies in strollers and stand in the doorway. Everything on this train is now a conversational ploy for parenthood and neither the window nor the volume in my headphones can compete.

 It’s raining when I get off The Underground and no one knows me in this place. Down the sidewalk soaking it in—past a palace in Hyde Park but my socks have taken on water and the hotel bed is the only cure for wet feet and foreign streets. Exhaustion and isolation are laying horizontally with my feet over the edge preparing to leave, dressed for an activity I am uninterested in. My immediate future is The Goats Tavern, all the pubs in England are animals, all my thoughts about English pubs are romantic and sitting by a window watching the rain--wondering if fog and England synonymous.