thoughts on homecoming (excerpt)
For 13 hours on the plane, I ate and drank nothing. Surrounding me, were people in protective coveralls—they looked like astronauts. Is this a rehearsal for posthuman star travel? I was amused by my romanticizing of this reverse exile, but still, I pulled out my phone-wrapped-in- plastic and started to play Space Oddity.
“And I'm floating in a most peculiar way And the stars look very different today.” ......
“Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do.”
I curled up in my seat and stared at the broken LCD screen in front of me. Flickering. Pixels wound the screen into a canyon, abyss, desert, and the chapped land in the American West. I did not know where I was headed—it seemed, to a place called home.
