A quiet vigil

Tonight I pressed my forehead against the airplane window. That thin partition. Plastic. Cool against my aching head, I passively watched the concrete acres where the airplanes live. Blue and green lights blur and oranges and yellows flash in the periphery. The planes sidled and moseyed in the darkness. In the deep abyss. Some menacing, some awkward and dawdling. Sharks. They crept along without effort. The way only a shark can propel itself. Gaining momentum without the flapping of gummy feet on the pavement.

I can't believe it. These planes.

We can go anywhere in the entire world.

But I looked down as we crept into the night sky, highways and lights. Dots on a map. Lightbulbs on commercial offices and baseball fields.


Ants in a sandbox.

And we think, that because we can go anywhere, that we know more?

And the mystery of things. Tell me of that.

The moon. That gaping and stupid white face.

The sound of the ocean. And that feeling when you can hear the roar and rush of waves in the night.

The hairs that stand up on the back of your neck when you're afraid.

When you're overwhelmed with feeling.

We can go anywhere, and we can know. Anything? The Internet. We can look up anything we want to in the world.

But I got on that plane, tapped my forehead against the thin plastic. I don't know how a plane works.

Don't know this pilot. Don't know.

And we have the science to know. The information at our fingertips. Was it in my hands?

Is anything?

Today I came from port-au-prince to Miami- and I didn't speak to a single person in passing.

I looked up from my book in the terminal and counted no less than 18 people on electronic devices. Gadgets.

We're going all over the world

And we're getting smaller and smaller.

Everyone is safe in their sense of things.

But when the lights go out.

When you're sitting in a room in the evening sunlight, the power is out and the water is cold. The language is foreign and no one cares about all the rest of the things that we've told ourselves. told each other. the us that we have ascribed to.

When we're left alone with ourselves, and the mystery of things.