Honestly I feel as though this entire time I've been pacing back and forth, accruing images of two ice caps slowly breaking themselves apart into tiny fragments of burning pitch that hurls itself onwards into the night, leaving bleeding trails of light as reminders, notes with coffee stains on the edges, written late at night without much light except for what scraps pour out from under the door from the reading light. You want to breathe normally but the bag won't inflate and it's so hard to calm down when everyone else is shaking and crying and prostrating themselves as though they'll consecrate the middle aisle with their cheap pleas for salvation, for their young childrens' lives, and for all the time they wasted ******* quietly in the dark after the reading light went off and even though they had a headache. They sing a song of mutual slump, of tacit awareness of the grandiose ******* of 75 years spent in too quiet comfort concerned with small victories and unconcerned with massive regrets. Then daylight breaks and you have to look your coffee stains straight in the eye and pretend they're just blemishes when they're sores and wounds and abscesses. And before long the paper disintegrates into brown pulp and you hate that you hate yourself because surely someone is more ****** than you. But that's just one moment out of the day, and you live them endlessly, you love them endlessly, overthinking, underthinking, drinking till you can't feel your extremities and then toying with a knife because you know you couldn't otherwise. Then you nick your pinky and realize how ******* stupid you must look, trapped in your own kitchen hearing your wife down the hall resent you more and more, her distaste, stained the color of sea foam off the coast of Cyprus, her frown fixed forever forward toward your back, and her face makes you sigh, and it's the same sound as before, sure, but now you know what is happening when these tiny admissions of regret escape from anyone else's lips. Then the plane picks up out of its nosedive and people cry and hold each other and you feel more dead than if your body had just ended up tangled in the wreckage of a turbine engine, your intestines laced between the blades like the back of a corset that gets tighter and tighter until you can't feel it anymore because you're numb.