Recycled Air

As I write this, it is very early in the morning on April 29th 2006 and I am thirty-four thousand feet about the Gulf of Mexico.

Hummingbirds follow a similar trajectory over the Gulf, to overwinter in Mexico.

I can’t sleep. I hate sleeping on planes. Sleep is such a private act. Still, I typically starve myself of sleep before I fly so I can doze off, make the time pass quicker.

All I managed was a quick nap, the kind where you wake up before you can even realize you’re asleep. So instead I decided to write, and watch out the window for the first hints of dawn – got a good hour and some to wait I think.

And what preoccupies my mind the most in this vibrating darkness is: why am I here, why am I doing this, what am I doing?

Sometimes, often, my family upsets me because I crave a purpose, structure, from them that in their absentminded way of loving, they cannot provide.

Starting breakfast on Christmas morning without me, oblivious to how determined my search for the ticket that would have me in bed at home on Christmas Eve so that I could wake up and have breakfast with them on Christmas morning.

I work to excel, because I crave the structure of explicit affirmation. I want to perform spectacularly not because my parents demand it or expect it, but because their approval is so generously (though vaguely) bestowed on nearly all of my activities.

I went to Belgium in June just because. And now eleven months later, I’m going to Brazil, just because. The truth is, I don’t know what I’m hoping to find I just know I’m looking for something; something in me, in my family history, direction. A lineage of sorts I suppose, in the scattered threads of a family largely never woven by a common country or language.

I have no strong ties to any place, and I am ambivalent, seen people strangled, choked, by their ties. Still, it would be nice to feel connection with somewhere, some place. I guess I’m not really going to accomplish anything, but just to exist temporarily elsewhere.

Still dark out.