The recycled oxygen and rhythmic slam of overhead compartments assaulted me as I moved down the aisle, each step an emotional mile from everything I'd left behind. When I spotted my seat, I realized I wasn't leaving. I was already gone.
And maybe—I wasn't sure, but maybe—I'd left a long, long time ago. My body might've been here in Denver but I'd let go months, perhaps even years ago. If I'd ever been holding on at all.
I dropped into my seat, hugged my backpack to my chest, rested my forehead on the bag's top handle. Doing this felt good and right but that didn't cancel out the whispers of doubt in my mind. Save for a few couches offered for short-term crashing, I had no plans to speak of, no vision. I had money but not girl living in one of the country's most expensive cities without a job money.
This is what you do, I heard in my head, a voice all too familiar and disparaging. You leap and then you look, and that's why your whole life goes to shit. You're a series of mistakes.
"No, I am not," I whispered. "I sent a million résumés last night and I have places to stay for a month. I looked. I looked."
"Excuse me? Excuse me, miss?"
Dammit. I was the miss. I was always the miss. Excuse me, miss, your skirt is tucked into your underwear and Excuse me, miss, you left your headlights on and Excuse me, miss, your credit card was declined and Excuse me, miss, that's wet paint.
I lifted my head and found a man staring down at me, his expression pinched like an apricot past the point of freshness. If he was an air marshal telling me I wasn't cleared for flight after the security checkpoint dramatics, I was going full Bridesmaids and making him carry me off this tin can. "Uh, yeah?"
To my surprise, the wilted apricot perked up. "There was a mix-up and my wife and I were seated separately. Would you be willing to take my seat? It's in the front, row five. Business class." He gestured to the woman with a small child on her lap beside me, the one I hadn't noticed during my what am I doing with my life? spinout. "No teething kiddos up there."
Pushing to my feet, I replied, "You got it, my friend. Show me the way."
See, this was how I knew everything would work out. I knew it because it always did. The universe had a way of smoothing out the wrinkles in good time and all I had to do was pay my karmic dues and wait for it. And I'd waited. Now my karmic dues were giving me a free upgrade to the open bar in business class and I was taking that as a sign I was on my way to the places I needed to go—wherever they were.
But the universe didn't smooth out those wrinkles with an iron. The universe smoothed much in the way retreating glaciers smoothed the Finger Lakes into existence—by dragging massive boulders over the earth and carving up the mantle as it went.
Slow and a bit violent.
And now, this universe had smoothed my path by getting me out of Denver, onto this flight, into business class, and…an arm's length away from a man who was muttering "Hard pass" as he scrolled through—
Oh my god, that was my résumé.
There was a boom in my brain, an explosion that'd waited decades to detonate, and I dropped my backpack into the wide expanse of legroom in front of the vacant seat. "Hard pass, huh?"
This was going to be fast and violent.
"Tell me, friend," I started, gesturing toward his screen, "what's the problem here?"
Instead of responding or—oh, I didn't know, blinking—he stared at me with the type of secondhand shame I'd encountered my entire life. As if he was mortified on my behalf but he couldn't begin to summarize the reasons why. They never knew why they were so damn embarrassed for me and that was because they were embarrassed with me. The shame, the mortification—it was always about them. It was how I made them feel, not how I, myself, was feeling.
And yes, of course, there were moments in my life that lived in the shame box. Others in mortification. A great handful in embarrassment. But I wasn't sitting here and beating myself up over it. Not long ago, I'd had a twenty-one-gun salute pointed at me in a