The last row of a plane is the one that makes you feel each bump, each jostle worse than anywhere else on the plane. If you’ve got a week stomach or an overactive imagination, the last row reveals it.

I can sit still, but even in the backrow I can’t think still. I’m a serial mental fidgeter. I find it difficult to do breathing exercises even on the ground. These chaotic & capricious eddies of air come patternless and unannounced, and they frighten me. I’m short, so I can’t distract myself easily by looking over the seats. So I look out the window.

We are above the clouds now, a cruising altitude. Clouds as far as I can see framed by the pillshaped window and bisected by a glossy grey wing. The wing gives me a sense of scale, but a false one. “It’s a seventy-foot wing,” I guessed, “so each cauliflower cloud is about …” and I have no formula in my mind that would place me on one corner of a triangle, the edges of the wingspan along legs of two sides of that triangle such that the clouds might be the base of the triangle opposite my vantage / point. It isn’t a mar de nubes, though I want to write down (I do write down) that it is. It is bumps & bumps, hillocks & eruptions of powderwhite, of charcoal grey, of flat muted blue. All in one long vista.

I imagine them all gathering in some wind event, a rainstorm-to-be right outside my window, all that potential to feed the earth, to cleanse, to bring spring. My stomach & my anxiety ease.

The engine hums, and I feel my left shoulder get colder & colder. Row 28 Seat E watching The Departed on a laptop has leaned forward, a trickle of air from the spigot above bouncing off his broad fleece back & ricocheting onto me. I turn to the window again, looking back behind the crew’s galley, back toward the sun.

We’re flying pretty much due northeast now, late afternoon the last day of the first week of spring. (I’m heading to a committee meeting, the last such meeting, unbeknownst to me, the other members, or the administrators. We had our last meal in the hotel that last night, numbed by the rich meals we’d paid for out in the city. “Isn’t it a luxury to just sit here,” one member mused, vulnerable through our years of working together, “sipping wine, and talking books? This was all I ever wanted.” “Same”, we each said, “same.” I’m on the way to that weekend meeting; she’ll say that on Sunday night. two nights from now. This flight is AA2019 Friday March 28, 2019, DFW to PIT. Covid is a year away.) You can’t see the sun, just a plexiglass refracted setting of rays disappearing into the cloudscape, now a long sheet, a kind of celestial milky opaque bubble wrap.

It is still at 550MPH–it is the kind of stillness you feel only at 550 MPH. The clouds varied & linked thick, revealing no glimpse of shaded land below. I don’t know where we are. We’re high enough in the air that we could be anywhere.

I’m almost there.

^{I wrote this a while ago, while nervous on a flight. The title is from one of my favorite Laurie Anderson songs. I didn’t take a photo that day. The photo above is from July 14, 2022 on the AA1331 LAX to DFW.}