During takeoff, I have to look. I lean into the window, my damp forehead sticking to the plastic. I watch as the ground rapidly loses texture and becomes a series of geometric shapes. As I breathe in and out deliberately, we rise. I’m surprised to see so many lakes. Florida is so flat—you rarely notice a lake until you’ve walked right into it.
Fields of thick trees look purple. Cars glint like little silver game pieces, winding along cartoonish roads. Up and away we go.
We reach a safe altitude early. I turn my phone on in time to take a picture of the shore near Caladisi Island. I recognize the tide-swept arc of sandbars. I remember my son—just a toddler in 2007—running across the hard-packed sand chasing seagulls.
Then we’re out over the Gulf of Mexico, and the surface is so clear and the sun so low on the horizon that it simply looks like blue. Blue tumbling into blue tumbling into blue. We could be a million miles up or just skimming the surface.
The plane hums around me and I smile, surprised to feel childishly excited. I listen to music, my sweaty fingers leaving odd trails across my phone’s touch screen. It’s odd being held aloft by technology and soothed by electronic sounds while staring at expansive evidence that the world is not simple and flat but round and vibrant and solid and so much bigger than all of us.
Two hours later, descending into Texas, I peer down at a patchwork quilt of farms. One house on a big plot of land. A glittering pond. A long driveway. A long skinny barn. Then a dense line of uniform houses. A school with ball fields, a church. Thousands of little lives and livelihoods and scurrying destinies.
I half-anticipate a barrel roll and a sharp descent. (This is a dream I have so often.) Instead, we simply continue to sink.
The clouds offer resistance, catching us and tugging. (Stay up here, with us.)
We bounce, so I close my eyes. And when I open them we’re closer and closer yet. I make out words on the sides of big trucks in a parking lot next to a line of warehouses and then I see the hieroglyphics painted at the edge of the runway and then with a surprisingly gentle whoosh and bump we’re on the solid ground. Fighting our own momentum.
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