The girl before the travel

Sitting on a jet plane, in the back fucking row, SMS’ing to the last. I am twenty-four years young and I feel every day of that youth right now.

***
I’m sorry
I couldn’t say thank you
For the lump in my throat
When you returned my boarding pass

The faces I won’t see for a year
The voices I won’t hear
The feeling people won’t be near if I need them
The provision of the cotton wool cloud around me is stripped

I feel alone.
It isn’t until
‘I miss you already’
Mum sends me a text
That I begin to shed

For whom am I crying?
I’m fine. My heart broke yesterday. But they do that, don’t they?

***

Mum arrived back home before take off. To my little blue car and my empty room.

The flight attendant asked me to turn my phone off. I go the adrenaline surge nerves like I do in an exam after ‘pens down.’ I snuck in a few letters to reply to his ‘u ready yet?’ with ‘as ill ever b x.’ No time for apostrophes and a kiss at the end. Sealed.

Of all people, my flatmate Rosa, in her infinite wisdom (of which she is completely oblivious to possessing) spoke with quiet conviction when we met for coffee one last time before my departure. She wore a pearl around her neck which she's never worn before. I remember feeling like she was giving me her bessing to go and discover the pearl in this world that was to become my oyster. From beneath her sensible square glasses she mumbled, ‘oh, the tyranny of distance.’

I wanted to see the world. I went thinking I knew who I was, thinking I wasn’t travelling to find myself. I wasn’t lost, or at least that’s what I believed. I started to wonder whether this girl on the outbound flight would recognise the one that someday would return on the inbound. I hoped I wouldn’t.