By S. SARGENT
Sunset over Greenland first appears as
a swirling cauldron of white, thick and heavy. Below the wing,
swollen cotton batting makes its way across the land. Alone,
I waited in the dim hall of a business high-rise on a late
Saturday afternoon. Everything was closed. I sat, I stretched,
did squats and push-ups. I made lists of everything to take
with me on my trip. His 30 minutes became three hours. Lotion,
lotion, and more lotion and my hands are still like sandpaper.
We connected through bad connections on our cell phones. There’s
never enough water on these long flights. “Do you hate
me?” A rhetorical question. He half sang it, took my
hand and seated me. It had been too long. An attractive man’s
head was silhouetted against the sun’s rays that made
it through the plane and splashed onto the wall behind him.
The creamy lemon oval, interrupted only by his shadow, quickly
changed to fiery pink, shifted to red-purple, then disappeared,
leaving only a hint of red on the flat gray wall. Cinching
the black satiny cloth at the nape of my neck, he wasted no
time with small talk. His feelings were first on the agenda.
Opposite, a simmering red-orange fire burns just above the
cloud horizon, followed by a thin gray-violet, then thick
pale lemon leads into a tall baby blue. “Most people
play games,” he stated, “but I believe in being
honest with myself and straight with others.” This made
me nervous.
Through the window in front of the silhouetted man, the sky
is cotton candy pink above a light blue wing. He ran his fingers
through my hair and confessed, or so he claimed. A translucent
blue, the kind seen only at dusk, hovers over the wing that
grows ever grayer. I was quiet afterward, stumbled lamely
on a few responses that were clearly half-hearted. He brushed
them all aside. Finally, before leaving, I admitted, “I
do feel a connection with you, but I don’t know yet
what it is for me.” The wing and the sky shift ever
closer in shade and in hue. Fine with him. He knows how he
feels; he’ll wait for me to figure out my part. The
cloud horizon becomes charcoal against a ribbon of burnt orange
with a streak of aqua green. It all rests below a vast gray-violet.
“Pay what you feel is fair.” Very close now. Fair?!
As it deepens, the sky opposite lightens as if over-anodized.
The charcoal bands chomp down on the isolated color in the
center; the pale orange doesn’t stand a chance. He stared
at me quietly, smugly, and waited for me to figure it out.
It gave me time to feel, something I’ve been missing
with my husband. Why is the need to verbalize stronger than
the need to be? The midnight blue begins to glow above a dead
gray. It took surprisingly little time for me to know what
I wanted to pay. The quietness he offered was peaceful, rare.
Beyond the window, the two grays have shifted into a truly
seductive, deep blue-violet. He hugged me goodbye, and I welcomed
the suppleness of his leather coat against my skin. He whispered,
“Let go, I am.” “I know you are,”
I chortled. He smiled and pulled away. The luminosity is all
that now separates the two fading shades of gray of the plane
wing and the sky. His long fingers tugged at the wisp of hair
by my ear. One last check of his work, I thought, but he lingered.
The seasoned traveler next to me thinks there’s another
more stable star than the pilot star. Unexpectedly, my breath
caught, then quickened.