We are now beginning our descent
No passenger knows how long the descent is. A pilot can say that they’ve begun the descent, but excluding their estimate of how much time until we touch down, it’s sort of meaningless to most of us.
How high is thirty-thousand feet anyway? Can us mere landwalkers really distinguish between twenty- and thirty-thousand feet—without direct photo comparisons?
We just know that, well, we’re descending. We know it’s time to strap in out seatbelts (or at least pretend to and hide our rebellion under a jacket or something), open the window shades, and sit there and wait. And wait.
Eventually we can see the ground get closer and closer, and then there’s that moment where you just seem to hover above the ground and you wonder why we haven’t landed yet or if we’re going to land, or what about now, or now, or—
And then there’s that bounce. The wheels touch the pavement. And like that, the descent, and the journey, it’s all done.
Getting my legs back
I’m in the Big Apple. It’s 3 P.M.
Which means it’s noon back in California, back where my parents are. They should be awake, and if all is normal, my dad should be sitting on his usual couch—doing nothing, just sitting there, like normal.
But I don’t know if things are ‘normal,’ at least not for sure.
I pull out my phone and open an app that lets me view the two security cameras I installed inside my parents’ house; one that views the kitchen, and one for the living room. I bought the cameras thinking that if I could check in and see with my own eyes, that my parents are okay, then that would free me to be wherever I wanted to be in the world.
In a sense, that’s what I’m in New York for, to answer the question: “Could I live away from my parents?”
The view loads, the one of the living room. My dad is there, sitting on the couch, legs propped up on the coffee table.
And then I swap cameras to see the kitchen.
And in that instant, I get the answer I’m looking for.
Pillbox
Thanks to some videogames I played as a kid, ‘pillbox’ to me is—first and foremost—the defensive structure built to fight in wars; those little concrete structures with small windows you can fire guns out of.Thanks to the powers that be, pillboxes are also, well, those little plastic boxes people can use to put their pills in so that it’s easy to remember what pills one has to take.
Pills, and pillboxes, have become a bit of a warzone in my parents’ house.
My mom has anywhere between fifteen to twenty pills to take on any given day. Most are over-the-counter stuff; stuff like vitamins, fish oils, etc., all with varying degrees of scientific backing. Things that I’m sure my mom randomly heard one day, five years ago, were the cure-all, or was somehow absolutely necessary to take as you aged.Others, are prescriptions. These are a bit more serious.
I’m not very good at keeping track of pills myself. I can barely remember to take a daily vitamin, and will only remember to take antibiotics because, goddammit, I hate feeling sick.
I cannot imagine taking twenty different pills. Forget helping somebody else, take twenty pills.
Home is a place in time
I feel homesick.
Well, truth be told, I don’t actually know what I’m feeling. Homesick, is just the closest feeling that comes to mind.
So that’s what I say: I feel homesick. I want to go home.
But I am home. I’m not in the house I grew up in, but I am in the same town.
The town where the streets are largely the same. There’s the same Taco Bell, the one pizza spot, the small library. The Safeway moved across the street, but that hardly counts as change.
But the more time I spend in my hometown, the more I realize, it’s not even the same town. The demographics. The busyness. The downtown. They’re all very different.
So what do you mean, Dan? What do you mean, you want to go home?