Dreams of Flight

Playing with tenses!!

Looking off the side of the road onto the sprawl of the raining Michigan country, he felt his eyes sore terribly. Where had been the place he spent everyday now became infinitely unworthy of his time. The sore eyes felt more like a psychological reaction than a physical one—or both. On the car window he saw a faint reflection of himself too. Tired, red-eyed, hands covering his nose and mouth, he saw a tinge of hesitation, of remorse, or perhaps guilt. He quickly quashed it, however, forcing together for his own ego’s sake – since people have always said that he looks better with it – a smile, a move so typically American; he might as well have not; it looked ugly and dirty, there wasn’t anybody else for him to brighten, to enlighten; it didn’t change anything. He quickly grew tired of maintaining that expression, and down his head plummeted into his hand, and down he fell into sleep and later into his dreams, succumbing to it helplessly, away from the soreness and the ugliness, into flight and weightlessness. Literal. How tragic, he told himself, how tragic. 

****

He has never seen the sky so clearly ever before. 

The flight had been delayed for a few hours. Now departing at 8:38 pm, he dizzily carries himself into the plane. The post-nap body can’t take any of anything much longer and as soon as he plunges into his seat he falls asleep, not affected by the bustling crowd still slowly boarding the plane at all. Even as the engine started and as the plane took off in a drastic change in cabin air pressure, he did not need a gracing period for his consciousness to assimilate to the noisy engine and to treat it not as an intrusive noise preventing any sort of peace, he simply accepted it. 

Somehow, the turning on of lights awoke him. In a dark background, a stark light frightens him. So he turns to the window. They broke the clouds already and entered what looked like a level above earth. With his vision unobscured, the stars in the sky too, present themselves clearly like never before. It looks like a sprawl of complex coding. However calming the vibe, it still didn’t mean anything to him. The stars still looked like an encrypted code, like foreign language, like jargon, like an electric circuitboard, perplexing him infinitely.

The lights emanating from the stars don’t hurt him at all. It’s got an aura to it, that of warmth from something unfamiliar. The flight attendant now came to his row and as he turned his eyes back, his eyes sore irresistably. He asks for a cup of diet coke and turned back to his view immediately, almost like when, always, he ran into a heated classroom in the cold of December Ann Arbor, not wearing a coat sturdy or thick enough for the wind to pierce his outside fully. 

****

By the time he arrived back to his apartment in Shanghai, everything seemed like it’s in its place. In his apartment he could feel isolated – the good kind of isolation. 31 floors high, the place is as quiet as vacuum with only the faint sound of the transit train and cars far underneath him occasionally rising up a few minutes. Looking out at the rush hour traffic, he felt bad for the people who live underneath, to whom the noise was not so faint at all. He felt too a lack of need to leave the house, because truly, this right here was all he had been craving for the last months. 

I’ll give you a few days to relax, his Mom said. To welcome him back, his family prepared all his favorite dishes. He couldn’t contain himself the moment he entered the kitchen to talk to his grandma. A smile rose on his face and with it rose a feeling, so strange because he has not felt it for months and yet so familiar to his youthful self, of primal crave and an indelible appreciation for the gift of life. It seemed to him that there was no greater place on Earth to be, no greater people to be with.

He finished dinner and as the streets quiets down, he decided to go take a walk with the dog. 

She’s called lucky, this dog of his. He always talked to his friends in America about how she doesn’t care about anything except for food and laughed about the antics she would go to when begging for food. Deep down inside, he still wished to know whether Lucky really cared about him or not. This time when he came back she seemed to have recognized him? She got slightly excited for around 5 minutes before crawling back to her little hideaway spot underneath the table holding the television up. Now that he was walking her, she insists on going towards the river. The two of them struggle along the two sides of the leash for a few minutes. Thinking that she wouldn’t budge, he complied and off to the river they go; I’m really home, he thought. Everything felt the same as before. 

The night dawned upon the city. The lights came on. The skyline he loved so much finally appeared in front of his eyes again. Again, the faint bustling of the cars. Despite that, the moving vehicles bring this image alive and the wind, too, reminds him of his existence, of his own breath and heartbeat. 

As he got home, he went straight to bed. He felt no need to take melatonin despite the jetlag. The blanket, although warm, had a tinge of comforting coldness that came from a lack of human use over the last half a year. With it wrapped around him, he quickly submitted into that comfort that he longed for such a long time. 

***

After the days went by just as days go by, and the initial excitement dissipated just like why Lucky tucked back into her spot under the tele, there grew a sense of discontent. His unresting mind asked him to go somewhere, yet that somewhere seemed so ambiguous that he might as well not have tried to find out anyways. Sinking into it, he again felt a dread that only just a few days ago, he escaped. 

His mom brought him to a family dinner gathering that day.

Sat in a roundtable, there rose a klaxoning of welcomes the instant he steps into the room. Deployed by his family, he understands his mission. They talk about his experiences in Ann Arbor, congratulated him for a successful education.

Surface level conversation seemed not to satisfy them, though, as they quickly interrogated him for his future plans. He, in his mind, took a look at his current and ambiguous future self, conjures up a quick response. Lawyer, yes, I want to be a lawyer, he says. Soon people made faces of amazement and exclamations of pleasant surprise that comes when someone does something unexpectedly audacious. Audacious in words, but not in actions, he thought. He wondered what he was going to do for the next few days now that he’s done with school. The American in him wants to better himself.

His eyes started to sore again, just a bit. 

 Soon enough the food came on along with liquor. With a young person at the table, the elders naturally teased him with the idea of testing his true capacity. Immediately, as all young adults do before submitting, he maintains the ethically expected response of rejection. But that formalized rejection only confirmed to the elders that he would, in fact, comply. Under the almost sardonic laughs of the elders, he goes bottoms up. The reality, so vividly in front of him and not faint in the distance anymore, provides him 

“There’s no escape” one of the people said to him.

He came back home and felt the same way too. All that joy he savored in the past few days seemed so inconsequential now. What will he even do with his life? He sleeped, this night as quickly as the other, but under the dizzying influence of alcohol: he didn’t sink into it, he was pressed down into it.

He dreams of a flight away again.