Flying low

It's 5 AM. Waking up after a three-hour sleep ain't easy. It's full moon, sharp coldness draws underneath. Teens' washed-out faces greet me along the way to the airport. Some of them are trying to figure out if I'm one of them — but the weekend bag gives me away. Most of them can't be bothered.

Flying is so mechanical, so lifeless, so dull. Exhausting, without being exciting. I'm starving to get from point A to point B in a blink, as a machine, not looking left or right, just passing through crowds and checks as a knife slicing butter, then sleeping on a plane and then crowds and checks again, until I breathe a fine cold air mixed with fumes someplace else. And a bed, I always need a bed afterwards, unless it's already evening and one has to party. Or unless it's morning and one has to work.

Once there were single-serving friends, those are long gone with the dawn of cheap flights; nobody even troubles oneself to pretend they're interested in the fellow in the seat next to them anymore. Nobody talks to anybody; why would they? It looks silly on a bus and more so on a plane now. Hour here, hour there, one can read a paper or dig their nose instead. There's no point to care.

This everlasting nausea is suffocating and torturing, yet one never drowns. It's over in short enough time and there's still flowers blooming outside, Jim Beam flowing and girls making love. And that does it for me as soon as I land. Every time.