Before the Flight

In a Business Times survey in March 2002, 44% of young Singaporean professionals, asked what made Singapore home, replied, nothing, they couldn’t wait to catch the first flight out.

Before the flight is a restlessness that comes
of being in an enclosed space, not moving.
You’re flipping through the inflight magazines,
scanning the playlists, imagining the movies,
acknowledging that they’ve pulled out all the stops to amuse you,
but wondering when you would feel the jolt of the wheel blocks
being moved.  Sometimes it happens so subtly you
don’t even notice it. You do notice the cheap cologne of hot towels,
and even though you try hard not to, the safety video,
especially when it starts chirping in Korean.
You’re not there for safety, you reflect, and that is why
it doesn’t do to make you feel at home, even before the engines
growl into life, sounding like a regulated air-conditioning unit.
Yet it is before the flight that makes the flight,
though there is no more graphic representation of leaving
it all behind than to see it all growing tinier and more distant
from your window, for when you’ve lived in one place for too long,
you need to find another, to find out what home truly is.