I have cried twice on planes. Both times I was coping with the inevitable entropy of happiness, love, and beauty. Moments I had waited for, and knew when they came, that they would end. The exhilarating high I got from having those fragments of connection would cease. I knew it first hand, when I got that flip on my stomach, knowing that everything that lives, must one day die. And my tears, they were poetry. They were tragic and beautiful at the same time. As distance grew, I could somehow experience such a subjective separation in a very tangible way. It was no longer a metaphor. And I could cry, I was now allowed to.
Everything I love, all my secrets, and everything I hate about myself, I have placed in this space. It is not a safe place but is the only place that has ever felt like home. A place where I don’t even know if I am welcomed anymore. A place I know for sure I can never go back to. New foreign things have been built on the ashes of what I have held most dearly. And even though I sense the familiarity in the smell of the air, whenever I visit the place, I feel deeply grateful and sad at the same time. I have a hard time letting go of the things that mean a lot to me.
I am a very caring person, but it takes a lot for something to get into the core of my heart. It is a sacred place that I am very protective of. And I should be. The core of my heart is sacred to me. And every time I have treated it as less than sacred, I have felt small, disconnected, lonely and insignificant. This belief is, by no means, rooted on ideas of superiority. I am as sacred as everyone around me. No human being is entitled to the core of my heart, just as I am not entitled to any other person’s heart. And yeah, everything I love, I have placed in the only place that has ever felt like home. And that place is no longer safe, and I don’t even belong there anymore. I have been in an intimate relationship with this place, and that relationship died. But this place still exists, and it still contains all these wonderful, magical things. So yeah, I have cried on planes… and chances are I will always feel grateful and sad when I think if this place. I will always taste the bittersweetness of loss when I hear its name, when they play that song, when I travel in planes to anywhere that symbolically represents that place: the home that was and now isn’t.
Utterly Disclosed 