Essay: Woman on the airplane

Dispatch from the sky

I’m writing this from the airplane window seat as an underslept woman in the wake of her book’s debut. I’m an exhausted lump of adrenaline, overwhelm, and gratitude, but I’m happy to be here.

Yesterday, I couldn’t eat. Instead, I repeated the affirmations my therapist had given me in the dwindling moments of our last session:  

I’m doing my best

I am meant to do this

I am where I am 

I didn’t feel much better, but before I left for my launch event, I switched on my living room light. I like the idea of someone leaving the light on for me—even if that someone is just me. Then, I called myself an Uber and met my publicist at Powells. I was so nervous, I failed to notice my name on the marquee outside. In the three minutes before the event started, we ran downstairs like school kids so my publicist could block traffic and take a pic of me crying beneath the sign. 

What I didn’t expect was how much my book launch event would feel like a wedding day. I mean, I’ve never been married but I did feel like a bride peeking around the corner to a full house—folks looking back and gasping a little. Except I didn’t wear white—I was in all black, a bolo tie, and turquoise cowboy boots. And I kept thinking of Rosie Thomas’s Wedding Day—that wonderfully weepy song about not getting a wedding but getting a life. It made me inexplicably sob when I was 25, and now, and at 38, I begin to understand why. 

I’m not sure I’ll ever marry, but last night, I did get to walk out to the most tenderhearted crowd and tell my story. And then, everyone was kind enough to applaud. 

When you get married, they say to write down the tiny memories, the things the photographer might not catch, the little details that slip by like blue moths in the dark. So now, I’m on the plane listing what I’ll remember from my not-wedding:

• The toddler who made me a set of drawings during my talk and then gifted them to me after the reading.  

• Rikki, the Anthropologie sales associate who helped me pick out tour outfits in the fitting room and then showed up weeks later to my event (and brought two of her friends).

• The stranger who wept so hard when I signed her book, she couldn’t talk. She never told me why and she’ll never have to.

• A man, likely in his seventies, who had seen me on local television earlier in the week and then came to my signing bearing a single red rose.

• The friend who described my book the only way I’ve ever wanted anyone to: this book is full of gentle stings.

And that is the only thing I’ve hoped my poems would do: sting and swab and sweat like honey.

Here’s what’s ahead! Let me know if I’ll see you on the road!