November 22, 2018:
She let me have the window seat. Next door to Heaven for the boy whose sole ambition was flight.
Thrilled beyond thrills. Takeoff rush, view from up high. I took Instamatic snaps of desert, mountains, clouds... wonderful.
Decades later she told me she'd been scared witless, but hid it from me at the time. She claimed she'd been afraid to fly her entire life.
Given her propensity for habitual lies plus her skill at retrospectively remembering in whatever way suited each moment's need for rationalization, I find that dubious.
More likely was her later-in-life endemic anxiety projected backward. By then she was afraid of everything. Most irrationally of identity theft. Definitely of flight. Or anyways that was her rationalization for never having visited me in twenty years, not even once.
If she were alive today I'd be all over her to experiment with bupropion. Knowing what I know now of congenital depression, its onsets, its relationship to loneliness: I'd be all over her.
If she were alive today she'd tell me to go fuck myself. 'Cos that's what she always did, and 'cos the last person anywhere in the world she was gonna listen to about this or anything else is obviously me.