Picture me—nineteen, kicked out of college—living in a waterless log cabin in Fairbanks, Alaska, on the far corner of my big sister’s property next door to a wingless commercial airplane that belonged to a guy who bought the plane on Ebay after his wife had left, had it delivered and parked in the driveway, spent months insulating, renovating, making it liveable because he couldn’t stand to be in a house that was once theirs, and those days I was sad a lot, not totally sure why, and I imagined the inside of the plane with the rows of seats ripped out, a fuselage stripped into a studio apartment with a sectional couch and a kitchenette, a Murphy bed near the cockpit, or maybe a single row in the back so he could spend his evenings pretending to be a passenger, mid-flight, on his way to some place new, or maybe he jerry-rigged cable and watched the pilot of Lost aspirationally, but who knows, I never actually saw the guy but was certain he looked like an older version of me, back when I ate fast food and chain smoked and drank Budweisers most days, back when I had time to get lost, mostly inside myself, and there was something so romantic about a wingless jet, about succumbing to loneliness, surrendering to isolation, and if I were braver and more original I would’ve broken into the jet, fired up the engines and piloted the body of a plane into the sky, not bound by logic or reality or the laws of physics and property and tropes, pressing buttons at random, assuming I’d survive, assuming I’d end up somewhere new, and I would steer that big tin can above the clouds, tilt if back, finally drink my fill and, looking down on a world too distant to make sense of, I’d lift the plane even higher, impossibly high, so high that I escape my own head and close my eyes and just take it all in, refuse to ground a jet that is capable of flying somewhere impossible, impossibly beautiful, recklessly imagined like nineteen years into the future where I see you, my three-year-old son, thumb in mouth, scanning the playground behind the Baptist church, squinting to see where you belong in the chaos, and I recognize the panic bottled in your body, which is still, but your mind is an incessant flicker, so I fly the wingless beast like a dragon over the playground to snap you out of it and, in a jet-stream cursive, spell out the truth: the man who once turned a plane into a trailer was a broken metaphor from the start—by the time I got to Fairbanks, his wife had already taken him back and he lived in a house with a woman who gave him a second chance; he parked a plane in plain sight of his happy ending and I only admired the idea of him because I refused to know any better—so chin up, son, young tenor, draw a long breath and pay attention while I land what’s left of this plane.
