Pleasure Spiked With Pain

I’m out of town this week, which is an exceedingly odd and upsetting circumstance. The context isn’t upsetting (just a routine trip to visit a college with my youngest, who insists on one day soon completing the slow process of abandonment initiated by his elder siblings), it’s just the fact of Being Away.

I was on a plane. Locked in with other disgusting humans and all their associated ejected sputa, bearing lord-knows-what pathogens. And I have to get on another plane tomorrow to get back to where I started, probably whole but certainly compromised, emotionally if not immunologically.

I know we’re supposed to want to travel after being shackled to our families—gross in their own ways—for so interminably long, but I’m here to tell you: don’t do it. It’s not worth the crush of anxiety and the pestering guilt. And I even brought one of my family with me. Where’s the escape in that?

I intend to survive. I’ll have someone let you know if that doesn’t happen.