I'm home alone tonight with my daughter.
It is a time when I can imagine what life would be like if we were together, but lived in different cities. I smile when I think about that, it's something I have been imagining for days, but I can still feel the distance as a tangible thing. That is how I know that space is more than emptiness. It is something solid between us.
Take out pizza and home made salad with lots of vegetable, a small glass of dark red wine for me after the meal while I write.
I remember pizzas of the past, mainly the ones we shared. I don't eat many pizzas, so I can remember many of them. I could write a book that went from pizza to pizza in my life.
When I'm alone like this, but I'm not really alone, I let my mind wander to what it would be like to be together, but apart. What would we do on nights like tonight. Would we jump in our cars and drive cross country? It seems to me like it would happen every night, no matter how impossible. Perhaps we'd need to become pilots so we could actually make it happen. I remember when my eyes were good and I was a pilot. The dangerous life I led! How much fun it would have been to share that. I'm not sure that a pilot with partial vision is a good idea, what are the platitudes? Every good landing is a controlled crash. And many of takeoffs almost were landings, I remember taking off with rime ice on the wings, polishing it off before jumping into the cockpit, what was I thinking? Taking off into the night from a small field in Louisiana near a large lake, fog, the same fog that solidified on the air cooled wings to form ice. Dark shadows towering over the plane as it accelerate, the shadows were enormous pines, the plane climbing slowly as if it would not clear them, but it did and the short flight home to a well lit air field, landing lights, sleepy ground control. In place of the single pole mounted bulb at the rural airport, the field has bright halogen type lights, like you'd seen on an interstate. In place of the grass runway, wet with dew, the runways and taxiways and parking are all concrete. In place of the sheds for the one or two airplanes, there are FBOs, fixed based operations, with gasoline. When I took off, the only supplies, the only gas and oil were what was in the plane, the only mechanic was me.
Life with you, but apart might be baths taken with speaker phones on. Together but apart, hardly the same experience. And yet, the effect of the sound of your voice soothes me, even more tangible than the very solid distance between us.
How hard it would be to be together but apart. It would be a constant battle to overcome the distances, with phones, with letters, with travel. All the things that are so fondly remembered now, the nervousness of being apart, the fear, the jealousy, the doubts, the desires, my pulse racing when I knew we were about to speak, when I saw a letter from you, when I knew you were coming, although you always made me wait for you.
But we share a certain amount of aloneness tonight. And in truth there is never more than half of me when we are apart, no matter who else is around. And you are likely not alone tonight, wild spirit hidden behind the competence, like me a wild force that belongs away from lights and concrete, in forests, deserts, on barely recognizable trails or no trails at all. With only our wits and those things which we carry to take on the world. Our dreams kept alive by sharing the same thoughts over and over again like the african drums.
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