NON By Eva Alom
4am. Lay before me a field of blue lights Brighter than a million miler medallions’ manifestations of elite shine could ever hope to be. If 5am was for the birds, then 4am was for the people who made the birds fly.
And I loved traveling with that secret.
And it was us, wasn’t it, who made them fly?
And if I never return, let it be known that I regret nothing, not a single messy dramatic or lonely moment.
For what is flight without roots to come from and who is a bird without a destination to dream of? Envy not the glamorous sex symbols of the sky, for we are our own. Longing still for adventure, authentically faking it because our collars are not white or blue, darlings, they’re chameleon’s camouflage. My own freeze frame record scratch moments happened there in the sky when I realized I could be anyone I wanted to be, be anywhere I want to be, for just a few days.
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Me, a working-class girl of Tennessee, sipping champagne amongst the bourgeois and laughing to myself, knowing I had infiltrated their gated world if only for a moment. And travel with that secret I did.
Not spending my 22nd birthday alone on the bench outside the P.F. Chang’s in the Atlanta airport because there was not a seat for me to get back home. Not waking up in the Bahamas on that November morning to find my brand new camera stolen alongside my dreams for my country. Not falling asleep alone in the Hermitage museum of Amsterdam after my spontaneous red eye, not going alone on a romantic canal cruise
