I left you at the airport at 5 to 8. Your gate closed at 15 past 8, and your flight departed at 15 to 9. It was on time, even though I prayed it would be late so we’d get more minutes together.
I left not crying, because I never do, but with a heaviness in my chest and a wateriness around my eyeballs. I regret everything, then nothing, then everything again. I flash angry-happy-desperate.
I travelled back to Saint Denis. It’s quite close to Charles de Gaulle, and I often hear the planes flying over the Seine. At 10 to 9, while walking on the bridge near my apartment, I see the flashing lights in the sky that signal a plane flying overhead. My profile is elevated to the heavens as I watch it, listen to it, suffering my lungs. I breathe your name. “I don’t know if that’s you. I love you.” I stare up a little too long and become disorientated as I try to walk across the bridge while gazing upwards. It must look comical.
Your plane or not, I am struck by the paradox of having nothing but a well of sky between us. Gravity’s apple stops me swimming up. I stand at the bottom of this well and I watch the sky-boat take you away. I whisper my love in bubbles that I hope the wind takes to you. All of this is impossible. Just wishing it with gasps.
And I think of what I told you. If the billions of anonymous people in this world were featureless sand, I would set them in an ashtray. Films, the television, and teachers tried to tell me every human in the world was special and different and mattered, but I get on and off the Metro everyday, and I see different, undistinguished faces of the crowd, bored, staring, dull eyes, inane gabber.
To me, they are grains of sand. The world is an ashtray, and we are all grains of sand swept up there, not sure and not feeling. I set the ashtray aside. I don’t hate them but I don’t care about them. Upturn it if you like, I do not care.
Except you. You I hold, I keep. You I find in the sand, and are more than a grain. My fellow vulture.
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