Outside of space
I feel outside of space on a plane. I can see the figure of our vehicle on the map, wings outstretched over Greenland and the northern reach of the Atlantic, but these are colors and shapes on a tiny screen that wiggles when the man in the seat ahead adjusts his back pillow. I don’t feel connected to the air which should be cold enough outside these walls to freeze my little bones. Never mind I’m thousands of feet about the ocean.
This is space travel, you know. The man in the seat next to me is watching Star Trek where two characters just apparated next two a third. They basically blinked and suddently they went from ship to valley and then patted their friend on the back. We are slower in our space travel now but not much. You can fall asleep in Seattle and wake up to breakfast with a friend in Hong Kong. You can watch a movie (you don’t even have to DO anything), and you’ll have traveled west on a journey that killed families who tried to make it from New England to the West Coast some hundreds of years back. It wasn’t long ago when the thought of a human in the sky was so fantastic it was only for gods. Now, the lady next to me is playing a crossword while she hurtles through the air at 590 miles an hour.
I’m signed in to Facebook so I can chat with my husband while I fly through the air with the greatest of ease. He’s spending time with a friend at our house, catching up and eating dinner. Talking to him, it’s like I’ve flung my thoughts 1500 miles back, and with such precision they’ve landed right there in the palm of his hand. “Maybe while I’m on the other side of the planet,” I tell him, “you could do some Christmas shopping.”
We are catching up to science fiction. It’s not that we’ve created every technology represented in every fantastic story but that we are living through technology in a way we thought was truly beyond our species. Flight? Space travel? Not nonsense anymore. Now we hardly balk at the idea that very soon our cars will not need us too drive, and shortly after that, robots will travel through our veins to rebuild our bones.
I’m falling asleep writing this which is great. I’ve got guided sleep mediations saved to my cordless phone/computer which I carry around in my pocket for this and a million other occasions. One more “I love you” sent over the airwaves, then I’ll sleep over the ocean and wake up in a foreign land.