Angels on Ice Skates

For the hundredth time I wish you were here. Climbing to thirty-three thousand feet, the confluence of two states spreads out to the east like the remnants of a phosphorescent tide. Well past sundown, we pass over towns like clots of pirates' jewels, the highways strings of rubies and pearls. Football towns, baseball towns, bedroom communities: I want to tell you what their names are, and why.

Someday soon I'll stop doing this, but it'll stay a scar that's still tender; strange to touch, alien, this same old solitary wound. I don't know why I think these things, even less so why I insist on documenting them. To learn from my mistakes? I'm sure there are enough books out there that I could just read and get the gist of it—it's not like you and I were anything new. But my penchant for the second-hand does let me appreciate the value of "new to me." And so I go on.

Years ago—what did I want to be before I was seven? Seven is my Year Zero, when my career aspirations were as follows: move to West Virginia (because of that John Denver song); become a professional tennis player (because of a cheesy Scholastic Press book I read); become a brain surgeon (because my best friend's mom said it was really hard); move to New York and get a big dog and live in an apartment with a whole bunch of locks on the door (since that's what I thought a girl had to do) and be a writer. In the eleventh grade, in Personal Finance, the teacher took a secret-ballot poll to see who thought they were going to: stay single; get married but not have children; get married and have children. Guess who cast the one ballot saying "single, with children"?

We're passing over a town that looks in the dark like an angel on ice skates. In addition to everything else I have said, I'm also the type of person who—not knowing what happens when you take a non-flash photograph through an airplane window of something six miles below you at night—would take the picture anyway, just to see what happened.

For example, when I was four, I Very Slowly And Scientifically stapled my thumb. I wanted to know whether the points would stay straight, or bend in. [Editor's note: All dates are approximate. Any relation to actual events is likewise in question. One's personal mythology is just that. Questions or complaints should be registered with the author's mother or other suitable quote-unquote adult. For the record, the points stayed straight.]