The following is a journal entry I wrote during a flight I took to see my parents. That weekend, I would "come out" to them.
Prodigal
Just boarded Flight 2640, from Newark to Daytona
Beach. I’ve never been in one of these
new planes before. I’m in a solo seat:
window to the left, aisle to the right.
Across the aisle, two seats next to a window. (Funny, they call these windows. They’re more like holes.) A woman in one seat, probably a bit older
than me, with the sturdy, earthy look of a peasant. But also very intelligent eyes, and in our
brief exchange—“I think we got the last seats.”
“Yes, it does appear that way”—revealed the clarity and precision of her
speech. I compliment her on her nails;
“It’s something stupid, like olive gloss,” she says. Another comment or two about the plane:
anything to distract myself.
Nothing
outside the window could do that.
Although this is my first flight in a long time, it’s all familiar:
those open flat beds on wheels with a steering wheel and a dashboard but no
windshield pulling trains of baggage cars with saggy curtains on the sides that
make them look like toys left out in the rain; the beige and black aluminum
panels that surround and shade windows kids love because on this side, planes
come from and go to places they’d never heard of: planes full of people, some of
whom look like no one they’ve ever seen.
Maybe
I’m one of them; after all, hadn’t Melanie (Mark’s four-year-old daughter)
pointed to me and declared, “He’s a woman!”?
I know I confused a lot of people today—including myself. Tried to “butch up” so my parents will
recognize me—or at least not start to ask a lot of questions—the moment they
meet me at the airport. But I also had
to be femme enough to resemble at least somewhat, the person whose photo adorns
the state ID card issued to Justine.
Taxiing
the runway. Even though I’ve flown a
number of times before, I’ve never been so nervous. The last time I flew, in August 2001, I was
coming back from a bicycling trip in the French and Italian Alps. It was only two years ago, but it was five or
six weeks before 9/11. But that’s not
the only reason why that trip, and all the others I took before it, seem so
long ago. Now they seem like events that
happened to someone else, in another lifetime.
That
last trip, and all the others, I took as Nick. And my parents think they’re going to meet
him in Terminal #3 of DAB. The plane
paused. Now it’s accelerating, darting
past a control tower, and finally beginning its liftoff. Less than a minute, and already we’re
hundreds of feet off the ground, teetering in the high wind. No way back now. No previous liftoff ever gave me such
butterflies in my stomach. Yes, this one
is rougher than others I remember. But I
still see all the same tract houses, parking lots and tank plantations one sees
on any takeoff from Newark. Yet they
seem so alien—new without novelty or the freshness of a discovery—and
vertiginous, at least to my eyes.
Now
we’re bumping through he clouds, and the buildings and the New Jersey swamp are
fading away. I’ve never felt so cold in
my life. Cold, yet the beads of sweat
cling to my forehead. The bumps stretch
into blips, and the clouds grow thick yet wispy in the intense sunlight. I’m still cold and nauseous; my breaths
shorten. I close my eyes. The sweat dries but I feel tears
welling. I take another swallow to
unclog my ears.
One
of my first discoveries in my transition was that I could cry in public. When you’re a woman, some people seem to
expect it from you. But nobody looks at
you askance. Today, on the other hand,
it seems that everyone has been doing just that, ever since I, butched up,
walked out of my door. What’ll I do now?
I
cry. I close my eyes. Tears stop momentarily. The drone of the plane mutters through my
head. Wake again: tears. The woman in the opposite seat catches my eye
for a moment and returns to her book.
The attendant—a pretty, round-faced ash-blonde with a slight drawl—rolls
a cart up aisle to my seat. “Cranberry
juice, please.” She starts to pour; the
plane thumps again. She apologizes. “I don’t know how you do that,” I say, more
as a distraction for me than a kudos for her.
Distractions
are all I want now. Like anything
outside the window. Like the bridge
threading through eyelets of land wound by a series of streams or inlets—maybe
it’s swampland, like the ground near Newark.
There are people who drive or walk or pedal across that bridge every
day; this is probably the only time I will ever see it. Nothing exceptional; it’s like a lot of other
highway bridges: an asphalt platform propped on steel girders. It’s probably no more unusual to the people
who cross it than it is to me, and if there’s ever a last time for them to
cross it, they probably won’t know it and they probably won’t realize that the
bridge has become a part of their past.
As
that land is. And this plane, and the
people on it, will soon be. We’re over
the ocean now, or some very large bay.
It’s odd, how much, from here, it looks the way the sky looks from the
ground: white wisps and streaks in a field of blue. Slender dartlike objects-- one red and white,
the other silver—leave a thin white trail that dissipates in the currents. I feel the plane beginning its descent; any
moment I expect the captain to announce it and our approach to Daytona Beach
International Airport. Knowing my
parents, they’re already there; if not, they’re on their way.
The
final approach. That phrase always
seemed strange to me. As if you’ll never
go that way again. As if neither he nor
the attendant would go there again. They’ll
probably do this again tomorrow, or some time before the week is over. They may’ve gone this way yesterday and the
day before. But it’s always the final
approach. Maybe this will really be the
last one.
What
a way to think when I’m about to see my parents! Then again, it may very well be the last time
I see them. The rows of houses, the
streets and the industrial-looking buildings are coming into view. A sand-colored ribbon slices through a patch
of swampland. Clouds thin and swirl into
mist around the wings just beyond my window.
Clumps of trees have the petrified green hues of the ones in
dioramas. We descend closer to the
ground; now it’s possible to tell old from young, mature from dying, and sick
trees. A road rounds the field where
we’re about to touch down; a red SUV and a white coupe make the turn. The sun, low in the horizon, glares through
my window. The Daytona Speedway looms
just ahead: rows of bleachers perched on seats I can’t see from here, not
unlike the football stadium of a large college.
An African-American man in an airline-issue shirt and tie waves an
orange cone in each hand, and the seatbelt signal is turned off. All click, except mine.
--13 November 2003
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