Delayed Gratification

There is an inescapable feeling when flying - that shift when you stop ascending and your stomach drops and you can't help but perceive the change from climbing means that you're falling. It reminds me of other things.

I spend my time in airports watching.

The older man in (I swear) a zoot suit and baseball cap, carrying a shaving kit.

The woman holding a book on biblical studies, wandering and looking lost.

A leggy redhead with vicious bruises peeking from under a miniskirt.

The balding man in first class taking out his contacts then smacking himself on the overhead compartment.

The man across the aisle too timid to tell his neighbor that he (the neighbor) is using the female receptor of his (the timid man) seat belt.

The woman next to me reading a relationship self-help book and twisting her engagement ring.

And all along I sit, trying to wrap my head around Schrodinger's explanation of quantum superpositions and finding it allegorical to life.

And cursing the short life of my iPod battery.

Then reading an article about a mathematician who posits that there are parallel existences, all based on the fact that everything is an equation, and I think - where on this axis is the membrane the thinnest that I can touch hands to the mirror-me?