l i f e
a good collins glass sweats
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christopher@30seconds.org
A good Collins glass sweats. This I've forgotten, until tonight.
Good evening.
A couple photos lay out in front of me and I'm looking a one Polaroid of me standing in front of an AT-19 sub-hunter that served with Royal Navy in 1944-45. Look it up. There are pictures out there, but this one I keep to myself. It shows a young, hopeful pilot, leaning on the wing support. He hasn't shaved in awhile and his flight suit has a little grease and oil on it from the pre and post flight checks.
No mystery, it's me. I navigated that plane to Shaw AFB and back this past weekend. In the upper corner of the photo are four small black X's. One for each flight I've made in the airplane.
A little fabric tears away from where we fixed the left fuel tank a couple weeks back. No worries. A quick patch she'll be good as new. Thing of it is, a few short months ago, I was scared of flying. Well, actually a year or so ago was when I broke that fear. It came with a dream. A memory perhaps. I don't know. It's foggy around the edges and I don't know if I...fuck it...I believe. Laugh, go ahead. I was a pilot.
The controls come too easy. The panel makes too much sense with all of its gauges. Alititude, manifold pressure, prop-pitch, air-speed, fuel, oil pressure, compass heading, artificial horizon, throttle, fuel mixture, mag switch, and so on...
I know these things.
I feel them.
But enough of that. I came home tonight to flowers. And a journal entry. Written to me when I was probably 6500 ft. over South Carolina looking for landmarks. I won't share the entry with you either, it is the one place where my writing is private and I only share it with one other person.
The beauty was in the entry itself, at the very end. More flowers. To completely different looking wildflowers on the same stem taped to the ruled paper.
One variegated, the other not.
She said to me isn't it neat that two flowers so different can be found on the same stem.
I say, it is indeed.
goodnight 8.11.98
