the north atlantic ocean makes me a little too pensive

It's on a darkened plane, stiffening corpse behind 5x4 pixelated screen, that it strikes me: I live in the future.


Outside, the same sailor-charted stars shine as we hurtle along - 600 miles an hour, in temperatures that could kill a man. We make a year of antiquity's journey in the space of a television episode while the stranger beside me is in earbuds, listening to another time's even. This is a world of genius trifles: ADD-dulled miracles and frivol magic.

Great Scott. What am I doing here? Here, in the future? 

So much of travel is wanting to see something past. But we wanderers can never truly see what we would like to see. All we can do is scrape at shadows of it - in a museum or an antique shop, deluding ourselves with flashes. Rarely are we satisfied with our moment - preferring instead to dwell on someone else's. 


All tourism is nostalgia. All nostalgia is tourism. 


Is all travel just an attempt to escape our own present? Our own futures? Is my whole trip just an attempt to escape? I am going to the future of another place - if not civilization's cradle, then its boarding school. But do I really want to be there, or would I rather have gone to the past?

Does it even matter? Even if I'd have rather traveled to 1964, I can't. Cosmically and historically speaking, how often do we end up where and when and with what we want? Just about never.


But this time, this place is just the moment I want - because I want to spend it with these two. I want this trip. This life. This morning.


Outside the window is a quiet dawn, but an electric one. London, here I come.