Trip to Arizona

    I board the plane and get row 24 seat B. The girl next to the window is wearing a black tee shirt, black camisole, black jacket, black culottes, and pink high top tennis shoes. She has piercings in eyebrow, nose, lip, and four in her ear. Her hair is probably genuine ash blonde, with stripes dyed black. I'd say she looks like a goth, except her attitude is more of a particularly fearful mouse. When I say "Hello," she bobs her head but doesn't look up, doesn't make eye contact, doesn't say anything in reply. She spends the entire flight staring at the lower edge of the seatback tray.
    The man to my right has a cafe au lait complexion, dreads halfway down his back, sunglasses, pinstriped suit pants and a tangerine business shirt with French cuffs. He looks interesting, but he's asleep before the stewardess gets up for the safety briefing. It's the standard briefing, no humor, no razzle dazzle, which is understandable because it's 5:42am. I ignore it.
    The plane lumbers to the runway, thinks longingly about coffee or whatever planes think about, and then rolls forward and lifts off. We--including my irradiated and ionized self--go up into the four dimensional curved space matrix maze of interlocking flight paths. When we come down, it may be that I'm not on quite the same world line that I started on.