Tracking Note:
Getting There is No Fun At All
21 June 2018
Kathleen and I exchanged a few texts during her ride out to JFK. Traffic was terrible; she was glad she’d left early; her phone’s power was down to 18%. Then and there I began to worry: my power levels never drop anywhere near 50%. I naturally but stupidly thought that Kathleen would text me from the Admiral’s Club, to let me know that she was recharging. But she didn’t, nor did she look at (or listen to) her phone. I didn’t hear from her until hours later, when she boarded the plane. I wished her a safe flight.
Flights themselves used to bother me: radio silence. Not any more, of course; now you can track them. Once the plane is said to have landed, though, I want to hear from Kathleen pronto.
She did not let me down, not then. It was at the next step that she flubbed. “I’ll text from the cab,” she had said when she landed. But she didn’t. She texted when she got to her room, in Carlsbad, not exactly a few blocks from San Diego airport. “Oh,” she said, before we said good night on the phone. By now, it was three in the morning where I was.
This is how great boulders are worn down to grains of sand.