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I'm currently sitting in a plane 39102 feet above Wisconsin, according to the built-in monitor embedded in the seat back a foot in front of my face. If I look left, three girls are watching satellite TV - all the same channel, Survivor or some similar nonsense. If I look to the right, a four year old boy is spreading himself out across two seats, covered in blankets, and getting ready to go to sleep. The lights in the tiny porthole window beyond him form a patchwork of civilization - a map of conquered spaces and pitch-black wilderness. From the looks of things, Wisconsin is not a particularly strong bastion of technological triumph at 10:24 in the evening.

Or whatever time it is. Time changes are fluid and there's no marker on the map to tell you when it's officially One Hour Earlier. My laptop has been having fun trying to guess. I've never really been able to wrap my head around the concept that we're flying forward in space and backwards in time simultaneously, but then again, I'll be living a full half-day into the future from everyone in Ontario once I hit Korea. It's really best not to think about it. Time travel is usually Bad News.

This kid beside me is awake again, watching a man in a cowboy hat chase kangaroos on his little screen and eating pretzels. He is traveling alone and particularly good at getting people to do things for him - I've already turned his overhead light on and off about twenty times according to his schizophrenic whims. The kid has a short attention span but I find him to be agreeable, as far as small children go. His dad apparently tossed him on this flight all on his lonesome, and I'm trying to talk to him a bit as a test of my tolerance (seeing as I'm supposed to shortly be teaching The Young and all). It's going okay. We watched the takeoff together and I realized that it had been a damn long time since I actually looked out of the window and watched as my plane raced into the sky.

Earlier in the flight I bought him a pair of cheapo $1 WestJet headphones so he could listen to the tennis game that apparently enraptured him. Actually, that's a lie: I have a wallet full of dimes and tried to spoon them off on the flight attendant, but when she learned that the headphones were for the kid she made me take all those fucking dimes back. So there you go. Anyways, he likes tennis a whole lot and would occasionally scream things in my ear about tennis from time to time. I don't care for tennis myself.

The Silver God is far too massive to fit comfortably into small seating areas. I've learned this on the Greyhound and now I've learned it in the air: a 19-inch screen makes for some poor spacial logistics. I am practically typing this entry vertically, on my chest. Everyone in the seats around me thinks I'm 100% retarded.

The kid is now talking to a similarly parentally-challenged child in the seat in front of him. It's a fairly strange feeling to be typing about Kiddo and taking momentary breaks to talk to him at the same time. I'm pretty sure he can't read, but if he could, I wonder what he would think about me capturing him in text, cataloguing his sporadic interests and ADD antics? I have a feeling that if he did find out, he would forget entirely within five minutes. Or he would ask for publishing rights. Oh God, the flight attendant is currently giving him a Coke. This spells disaster.

Wow, I only just realized that I didn't know his name. Cameron, apparently. As soon as I told Cam that we were flying over America, he pointed his fingers like a gun and said "BANG BANG". Cam clearly understands international politics and Redneck Wrath. I now have a creepy inkling that he's a super-genius of some sort and is currently reading my mind. Hahaha, and then he immediately ruins his newly-minted mystique by reaching down to grab his cookies from under the seat and absolutely smashes his face on the drop-down tray. I laugh. This is ridiculous.

He's passed out now, possibly concussed, snoring quietly, and what began as a story about flying away somehow turned into the Tale of Cameron the Tiny Traveler.

But I digress. I have a beautiful letter and an Entertaining Package of Aeroplane Games given to me by two of my favorite people, and the memories of a thousand goodbyes - some curt, some warm, some wrenchingly emotional - bouncing around in my head, and I am filled with gratitude. I am trying to push the fiery glow in my chest into this keyboard and convert the stinging in my eyes into text, but nothing seems right. Nothing seems full and whole. Nothing complete. I guess I'll just have to settle by saying that you need to know that I feel incredibly blessed by the generosity and well-wishes and presence of the people around and close to me during the last four years in Waterloo. I'm flying away, writing cheesy goodbye sentiments with a child playing with an Incredible Hulk action figure beside me (does this kid EVER sleep?), and all I have left to say is Thank You. I'll be back one day.

Posted by Chris at 02:04 PM >> Commentations (4)