Limbo: Altered States

No sooner does the plane angle up than I cork off to dream a bomb blast: A fireball roiling through the cabin in slo-mo, seat blown loose from its bolts, I hang weightless a nanosecond in blue space then jerk awake to ordered rows. And there’s the silver liquor cart jangling its thousand bells, the perfect doses of juniper gin and oak-flavored scotch held by a rose-nailed hand. I don’t miss drinking, don’t miss driving into shit with more molecular density than myself, nor the Mission Impossible reruns I sat before, nor the dead space inside only alcohol could fill and then not even. But I miss the aftermath, the pure simplicity: mouth parched, head hissing static. How little I asked of myself then—to suck the next breath, suffer the next heave, live till cocktail hour when I could mix the next sickness. I locked the bathroom door, sat on the closed commode, shirtless, in filmy underpants telling myself that death could fit my grasp and be staved off while in the smeary shaving glass, I practiced the stillness of a soul awaiting birth. For the real that swarmed beyond the door I was pure scorn, dead center of my stone and starless universe, orbited by no one. Novitiate obliterate, Saint Absence, Duchess of Naught . . . A stinging ether folded me in mist. Sometimes landing the head's pressure’s enormous. When my plane tilts down, houses grow large, streets lose their clear geometry. The leafy earth soon fills my portal, and in the gray graveyard of cars, a stick figure becomes my son in royal blue cap flapping his arms as if to rise. Thank god for our place in this forest of forms, for the gravitas that draws me back to him, and for how lightly lightly I touch down.