#plane sight

Please don’t remove my credit! ♥

Bordeaux, avril 2018

2011, Stomach

Styling on Sight Plains, cover story for Human Being Journal #6, Joshua Tree

Styling on Sight Plains, cover story for Human Being Journal #6, Joshua Tree

Styling on Sight Plains, cover story for Human Being Journal #6, Joshua Tree

Styling on Sight Plains, cover story for Human Being Journal #6, Joshua Tree

She sits in the window seat of this mechanical bird, hunched over, under a hand-stitched blue blanket draped across her lap, someone’s grandmother, abuelita del amor, paper thin caramel skin, silk turtle shell back, deep lines that trace journeys on her wise face, I see her in my mind, rolling corn and flour into a soft doughy nourishment between her crookeding fingers, gently rushing her grandchildren to dress for church, tortilla hands clutching one another as the plane begins its slow ascent into the sky. She is someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s friend, someone’s life, incapable of translation, unnecessary because her heart speaks my language, old spanish eyes that show everything to me, as I am the only one who cares to take notice. I look behind her thick, round lenses and see a woman who is a beacon to her family, a woman who is the sun to a growing rose, a woman who has struggled, but did it smiling. Lines don’t lie. I wonder who she is going to see, who is waiting to pick her up at the airport. I would wait for her. Abuelita. She makes the sign of the cross, nervously, as we reach the air, her hands now twiddle and tangle into the thick fibers of her blanket. I wish I was not so far away from her so I might soothe her anxiety with a conversation in my broken Spanish. Perhaps she would tell me about her granddaughter getting married in Monteréy, or about her childhood friend who suddenly can’t remember anything, or about the way she made breakfast for her husband everyday for 63 years and now that he is gone, she always has too many eggs and chorizos in the fridge. Perhaps we would laugh and the lines on her face would transform into another map of her life, a connect-the-dot pattern of pure joy. I smile just thinking of it, and she sees me smiling from down the row, and in that moment, neither of us feels alone.