Get the Fuck Down From the Sky

Well, somebody has to come down eventually.

I’m listening to Natalie Cole sing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and somewhere in that voice, I hear a woman hollering at somebody who has been on the roof entirely too fucking long.

What are you doing up there?

My brain supplies the rest:

Lucy. Baby. Get the fuck down from there.

Which is inconvenient when being up there pays your rent.

Some of us work in the sky. We put on a uniform, leave whatever is happening in our lives on the other side of an aircraft door, and take care of everybody else.

Your heartbreak? Stow it.

Your existential crisis? We’re boarding.

Could you feel that after the beverage service? Somebody needs a Diet Coke, and apparently civilization depends on whether we have lime.

And I can do that. I can function. Be useful. Smile. Handle a situation.

I’ll deal with myself when I land.

Then I land, and I’m tired.

I’ll deal with myself on my day off.

Then somehow I’m packing again.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the sky at once. An entire population going somewhere.

And here I am wondering how many times I can land without coming home to myself.

I love Natalie’s version. The wildness. The beauty. The permission to disappear somewhere strange for a few minutes.

I’m not trying to evict wonder from my life. Jesus Christ, leave me something.

But I know how to disappear into something beautiful.

A song. A man. A future so detailed I can tell you what we’re having for breakfast, despite the fact that the person starring in it has yet to demonstrate basic consistency.

Minor detail.

Look at the lighting.

Give me enough pain and a decent metaphor, and I can make anything sound profound. I can turn longing into loyalty. Put a silk scarf on self-abandonment and spend three paragraphs explaining the texture.

Meanwhile, I’m still abandoning myself.

Just exquisitely.

Writing helps me see it. But I’ve written beautifully about things I went right back to.

The insight was real.

So was the return trip.

Lucy, Air Traffic Control

This is where Lucy starts banging on the cockpit door.

“Land the plane.”

“But I’m processing.”

“No, babe. You’re circling.”

“But I’m trying to understand why I do this.”

“You understand plenty. What are you going to do?”

Rude.

Because understanding gives me somewhere to go. Another explanation. Somebody’s childhood. Somebody’s fear. I can follow those corridors for miles.

Sometimes it softens something in me.

“Later became a place where I stored my life.”

Sometimes it keeps me standing in a doorway I need to walk out of.

I thought if I understood the instability, I could stop needing stability. If I knew why somebody couldn’t meet me, maybe it would stop hurting that they didn’t.

Turns out I can understand the whole fucking situation and still be lonely in it.

Lucy wants to know what I’m going to do with that information.

I would prefer she admire my vocabulary.

Boom. Forty.

Then you’re forty.

Nobody hands you the missing instructions. You’re still you, except now pretending not to see certain things takes effort.

And there’s grief in what you see.

How long I waited to be chosen clearly. How often I called fear patience. How much understanding I offered while quietly negotiating away what I needed.

Some things cost me. Time. Sleep. Money. Trust in myself.

I get to be sad about that.

But I’m trying to stop looking at the person who survived those years like he’s an idiot I’ve been assigned to supervise.

He wanted love. He thought staying meant something.

Sometimes it did.

Sometimes staying was fear with very good manners.

I can admit that without putting my whole life on trial. I laughed in those years, too. I loved people. There were things worth keeping.

I don’t have to declare forty years a waste to want something different.

Still.

Fuck.

I was available for so many people.

I wish I’d been there for myself more often.

I’ll Deal With It When I Land

Compartmentalizing gets you through a workday. You can’t unpack every feeling in the aisle.

But I kept putting things aside without coming back for them.

The phone call. The appointment. The decision I already knew I needed to make.

Later became a place where I stored my life.

Working for the man. Watching the clock. Changing time zones. Trying to sleep. There was always a reason I was exhausted, always something to do before asking myself what was actually happening.

Then I’d get quiet, and everything I’d postponed would be waiting.

No wonder I wanted a distraction.

Up there, I had a job. A sequence of things to do.

On the ground, I had choices.

One more conversation.

One more chance.

Maybe after this trip.

I have spent a remarkable amount of time waiting for life to become calm enough for me to participate in it.

Cleopatra Can Come, Too

Then the music sends my mind wandering again. Cleopatra. Helen of Troy. Venus. Some moonlit goddess who has apparently never had to locate an employee parking shuttle.

Yes, I just delivered a speech about coming down to earth, and now I’m inviting the goddesses.

They can come.

I want beauty. A little theater. To walk into a room and feel like I’ve arrived inside my own skin.

In my imagination, these women carry myth in their bones. What draws me is the possibility of feeling that presence without waiting for somebody else to recognize it.

I’ve let other people’s desire tell me what I’m worth for long enough.

I want to like myself on a day when nobody is pursuing me.

To sit alone without treating my own company as a problem.

To have a beautiful moment and let it belong to me before reaching for the phone.

Still funny. Still sexual. Still spiritual. Occasionally overdressed.

Getting grounded does not require becoming beige.

No Final Lucy

Lucy isn’t waiting at the end of my healing with perfect boundaries and a clean fucking kitchen.

She’s here while I learn.

In the moment I say yes and realize I mean no.

In the pause before I send the paragraph.

In the recognition that I’m trying to get somebody’s attention when I need to pay attention to myself.

Sometimes I listen.

Sometimes I understand her point several business days later.

We’re working on it.

I won’t turn her into another beautiful version of myself I can never quite reach. She’s already here: a breath, a flicker of humor, the part of me that can still tell the truth when I’ve gone to considerable trouble to avoid it.

And I’m grateful I can still hear her.

So who do we have for the future?

Well.

We have me.

I was hoping to announce somebody with better sleep habits and a considerably larger savings account, but apparently I’m the one coming.

Me, practicing a self-love I can find evidence of in my day.

An appointment kept. Rest taken. A boundary I don’t spend the night negotiating away.

I’ll still go to the sky. I work there. I love parts of it. Natalie can still take me wherever the fuck she takes me.

But I want a life I return to.

One I’m present for.

And just as I’m sitting with that, Lucy picks up the intercom.

“Ladies, gentlemen, and those still waiting for somebody to choose them—this is Lucy speaking.

We’ve begun our descent into our own fucking lives.

Please check around your seat for anything you may have abandoned during the journey. Your voice. Your needs. That decision you keep putting off until after the next trip.

We spend a lot of time getting everybody else where they need to go. Today, let’s get ourselves home.

You don’t have to have it all figured out when we land. Just be there.”

All right, babe.

I’m coming.

Lucy is not an ending. She is the air in my lungs—never promised, always a gift.