Four hours later my flight came in on final to runway 9R all wild wobbly and drifting from what I’d no clue at the time was probably the wake vortex of the plane ahead of us and had to abort, wheels up, throttle, climb, and a collective hush in the cabin the only sense of sound besides my heartbeat and the voice of the contumeliously snotty twelve-ish-year-old and unrelated adult behind me gab-complaining about why we weren’t on the ground yet when he said prepare for landing “thirty minutes ago,” snarky and ungraciously arrogant, like their respective dads had told them too many times too believably that they were beautiful and brilliant while they jabbered on about everything they didn’t know, filled with judgment and confident misunderstanding  while I missed the desert more than two thousand miles behind me and hoped we wouldn’t miss the runway on the next go round and be that next flight on the news that ended up in a river.

Not everything happens for a reason, I thought, believing it a little, but we can do some figuring after, knowing I’d said that somewhere sometime before, my own ignorance—silent, albeit, besides the heartbeats—leaving me unable to track down my peaceful resignation defense, wondering why I suddenly cared so much, tired and unsettled and sick of those too-emblematic vapid voices abaft and missing her my atypical ideal real, gone in that matter of hours from warm no rush southwest daylight to chilly autumn old east night in a hurry, unsure what I’d find when I got to his house after eleven months and a diagnosis, mind race-wondering if it was bound to happen when I was unprepared for a reason with so much ahead and so much behind.