Far below me the airplane hits a patch of turbulence over southern Utah, and I jarringly fall back into my body, suddenly aware of bones and joints and meat and lips that are still ridiculously chapped from four days in the thin desert air.  An arm that wasn’t there a second ago falls off my lap and into the aisle.  Drearily, I open my eyes and look around at dozens of seat backs.  I haven’t slept much in days.  I’m trying to dream.  I feel around the edges of dreamspace so I can push myself back in.

I remember the flight home from Newark was like this last year.  Lacking pen or paper or word processor, drifting in a state between waking and sleeping, I’d spent most of the flight home going over and over my memories of TequilaCon, coaxing out those on the verge of being forgotten by stringing events together from beginning to end.  The narrative of last year’s recap had started to emerge on that flight, phrases turned over in my mind, sentences pushed through their permutations, trying each variation on for size.  I’d gone over the whole thing again and again until I’d woken up at 5AM on my third day back and pounded the whole thing out in a furious forty minute span of typing and linking.

It just seems like there’s so much more this year, though.  Whereas last year I had a theme, a style, a framework to hang my words across, this year I don’t seem to have a good idea where to start.  I keep cycling through the memories, trying to keep all the faces alive, faces I’d only known through still pictures before but that had suddenly come to life like storybook characters.  If I keep shuffling the right cards will come up, the story will emerge.  I hope.  Maybe I’ll just do something light this year with a lot of pictures.  No one is expecting much.

But for now, I need to sleep, to go back into the dreaming, from where all stories emerge.

I look up the aisle.  The flight attendants have just started pushing the beverage cart back from the front of the plane.  I’ve probably got about eight or nine minutes before they get to my seat in the last row.  I know where I need to be until then.  I close my eyes, and dissolve.

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