They met in Kansas City

He boarded the plane in Newark after a two hour drive up the Turnpike. He was flying to Denver via Kansas City. It was a work trip. He was headed west to meet with a group of distributors about new printing software. His work did not strike him as empty, just deeply inconsequential, like a summer weather report in Arizona.

He was in a daze, worn out from waking up at 4 A.M. Four A.M. was an ungodly hour, an hour that shouldn’t exist. The sun was an unhatched egg, all the trees were dark shapes, signs and symbols amidst some larger darkness. Everything about traveling is a pain the ass, remembering small plastic baggies in which to put the proper amount of toothpaste, lens solution, and toothbrushes, all in the right proportions, the right size, as if the size had some meaning, one six ounce bag, which he suspected it did not, but like many things in life, was arbitrary. He had spent the night before wondering whether to bring two pairs of shoes or one, wondering whether the  weather report could be trusted days out and whether it mattered.

On the way up the Turnpike he drove through portals of light, beckoning him towards Jersey like a series of light houses. The first skeins of light stretched above the horizon as he drove up the Turnpike. He watched the industrial mess of it unfold, machines sitting idle, gleaming and rusting in the half light of the sun, monoliths of a distant era. They looked like nothing so much as dinosaurs.

He sat at the table and stared out the window at the planes on the tarmac. Airplanes are dehumanizing, a reminder that his body is mere luggage, a collection of blood and bone to be transported.. He found it unnerving rather than invigorating to be above the clouds. In flight, he vacillated between a dazed sleep and fear of his imminent death. He did not know what he feared about death exactly, perhaps its finality. It was not as though is life had taken a course, if he was being honest with himself, that would knock the world off its axis if he no longer existed. Perhaps he just feared not knowing. The stewardesses boarding the plane were in their mid-forties. They looked tired and worn, travelers who have been too many places and seen too many things.

The sky is a wheel of purple, the clouds look like the purple hued finger prints of children. The woman next to him is snoring very lightly. As the plane slows he can see the imprint of a city on the ground below, reservoirs and golf courses appearing first. He pressed his face against the cool glass and thought of how strange it was that flying in planes existed at all.

From up above, canals, bits of tall buildings begin to come into view. From a plane, Kansas City is less a city than an idea of a place, a poetic rendering. From above, the cars started to come into view, streaming down freeways, managing to look both busy and unimportant at once. There was something perhaps rooted deep in the human psyche, traceable back to the Great Rift Valley, that made the feeling of being above others so God-like. From just beneath the clouds he could watch the cars gleaming metal slipping across the highways, the canals and roads snaking through the landscape aimlessly and somehow forget that he was a part of that same simple race. Perhaps that was how air travel had fundamentally changed man’s relationship to one another, allowed him to be turned into an abstraction. It was possible to drop a bomb that would kill thousands on an abstraction.

The woman next to him had woken up and was attempting to look out his window, bending down to peer over while clutching her purse as if he was a thief or it was her teddy bear. He had an exceedingly strong urge to not talk about the weather. He hoped they could land in a modicum of silence. Perhaps he could feign sleep.

After a moment, she will comment on the clouds, and soon they’ll be talking about reasons for being in the air, she’ll be describing how hard it was to leave just now, how her cat had just died, and the funeral that they’d had for him. He’ll be listening to this woman, watching the little pools of water forming at the corner of her eyes as she talks about the difficulty of losing her cat. And he’ll have to ask himself if he’s a bad person for not caring about the cat, or for not caring about the woman who cares for the cat.