The names of cities remind me of places that I have seen and places I have yet to see.
I look for the one that I'm currently in...and it feels like an ache.
It isn't a distance or a latitude. It's not a time zone. I think sadness is measured in depths, like how we measure the ocean in atmospheres. It is a plunging weighted feeling that seems like the lure of gravity and it just gets tiring.
It's not missing something, or misplacing something. It is something sawed off...tin-snip cutting into skin and bone and roughly removing and placing in a metal tray.
Like snapping a green twig in half, but it doesn't snap in two...you're left with sinew and stringy matter and you twist and you pull until it breaks apart....it is a reluctance.
It is not a departure, nor an arrival. It is a removal. It is a deletion.
A name in pencil vigorously rubbed with an eraser, leaving bits of paper and dust in its wake.
I sit in the airport and feel like I am not really coming back. I'm not returning to a time. I am away.
The airport scrapes against me as I watch the trudge of others perhaps returning to a place they cannot wait to return to.
I await the cold emptiness of a place not even still lukewarm from your shadow. A place you might have been...a place we were once.
I board the plane knowing that for a brief time I am no longer on the earth and therefore I am as far away from you as I can be.
And when I land I will be where you are and I will return to the place that I still recall with pain.
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