I sip overpriced Pinot Grigio but by default my imagination turns on – it’s you I taste on my tongue.

I swallow and my ears click, and I wonder if your shirts still smell the same.

The girl across from me in 5D is counting Hail Mary’s on her rosary, and I’m counting my split ends.

Thinkin’ about real life stuff, stuff without Snapchat and phone lines.

It’s 3:17 p.m. on Air Canada flight AC574 – The Flight of Patience, I decide.

How funny is it to think that we might have skipped this all – hit fast forward with ignorance – It wouldn’t be bliss, I don’t think.

The intercom crackles behind the thickness of Tom Petty’s Refugee that serenades me through my Apple ear buds.

Somethin’ about descent.

I swallow again, harder, and press a spearament gum into my mouth.

The flight attendant demands my plastic cup. She’s pushy, and I make the decision she’s without a Valentine.

I’m thinking. About how that would have been me – and of how we were one text away from a totally different story.

And how we wouldn’t have known any different.

Or maybe that’s the point — maybe we weren’t supposed to know that it would have happened anyways.

To be continued… A Book of Word Paintings 2016