Perhaps I will never understand the blindness of the seeing eye.

But the motion of the airplane moving off the tarmac into the air speaks my mother tongue, reminding me of childhood dreams of insect wings and orgasms. New beginnings and the end of the world erupt simultaneously as I trust myself to the miracle of escaping gravity. My fingers interweave with the hands of the lover I have contemplated leaving for years. White puffs of clouds float by us, suspended in air far above the carnival city of grids and electricity. Over the past decade, I have seen too many deadly housing projects and tenements. Paint flaking off the walls, children shot to death in the crossfire of gang wars. Citizens slipping through the cracks, reduced to living in cardboard hovels on sidewalks, calling on various gods in different languages for extreme unction. Patients in my clinic with fingers and parts of their feet amputated from ice and violence. An old black woman with mangled braids and the cheekbones of a queen saying, “Child, winter kills,” her voice like sand and honey as she showed me the stumps of her feet, dexterously using leathery ebony fingers to crush an insect that emerged from her matted hair.

The grids of buildings remind me of tombstones, of being underground or confined indoors for most of the year. As if human beings are fragile hothouse flowers flickering for survival on windowsills filled with dreary winter light.

The seat belt lights have been turned off, and the plane is on a level plateau. Bruna untangles her hand from mine and pulls the tray forward from the seat in front of her.

“What are you thinking, Pamela?” Her words are a faint smudge on the windowpane of long-ago desire.

Her voice has eroded over years, has mutated since that far off time when we still possessed that precious gift of not-love. A fall semester ten years ago when she and I and the rest of our medical school class sat staring at diagrams of chains of carbon atoms, the branching veins of the cranium, and the intricate variety of white blood cells we would need to imprint into our brains in order to pass the first semester. Back then, she spoke with the authority of a lioness as she introduced herself and invited me for coffee. I’m gonna take you to a place none of these gringos know.

“Tell me, what is on your mind?” she asks again. Her question trails off, thready and anemic. “Have you gone over the list of conference topics? We’ll be in San Francisco before you know it, Moosie.” Her red pen circles seminars on gynecology across the life cycle, estrogens and neurodegenerative disorders, novel treatments of ovarian dysgenesis.

I imagine myself erupting against the ennui, against the stale rules desiccating us and blowing us helter-skelter in the wind of boredom: I’m running away from everything we’ve known and trusted. I’m exploding the superstructure. In my mind, terrorists have taken over our plane. It is only minutes before the crash. The windows are on fire with a sun that turns black as the spiraling vortex sucks us into oblivion.

Across the newsreel of my brain, Bruna comes alive in rage and terror, high octane pulsing through her veins. Running for her life, for the sacred last gasps of breath before her final extermination. Caught in the flashbulb of fantasy, her powerful body is draped in layers of black silk. She is panting, and foam flecks the corners of her mouth in her doomed flight from the army of khaki-coated revolutionaries overtaking her. She flings herself forward limb by limb against a backdrop of glinting revolvers in the midst of a forbidden forest; her nails scratch against the glass of the cage doors the terrorists are pressing her into. The glass turns a brilliant orange as a Molotov cocktail explodes in the distance illuminating her strong bones and thick black eyebrows, impasto brushstrokes across her forehead. She emits pagan howls of protest and rage as the great shards of metal and glass begin collapsing in an inferno of oxidizing gasoline.

The images burn through my head of their own accord. An uneasy wind promising ash and fire. The conference topics have withered.

Bruna twists in her seat next to me. Her broad face, strong and heavy as a stone, comes down to meet mine. I enter the thicker air of her ancient cathedral. A druid ruin with sacred vows of immolation etched into primordial stone. Her love has made all others seem glossy and impermanent.

She contemplates me: an imagination-minded woman, her lover of ten years. A woman of causes and politics with a need to inhabit the caves of my loneliness. Like an animal, she smells the coming of death, migrations, and changes in estrogen. She senses that my mind is far away in some foreign frontier she cannot enter. She returns to the American Medical Women’s Association conference brochure and continues circling with her pen. “Don’t forget, there’s that woman—she’s from France or something—she’s connected to Doctors without Borders, and she’ll help you make arrangements to go to Africa if you really insist on going.” She softens. “You’re brilliant. You can do anything you want to.”

“I won’t forget.”

Bruna and her family had spent days in a boat without food, escaping from Cuba after Castro took over, eventually finding asylum in the United States. She considers my desire to spend a year in the steamy jungles of the third world studying tropical diseases is a form of madness. A first world indulgence.

“I really want to go to the presentation on the role of primary care and obstetrics and gynecology. You know sometimes I think about that, I shoulda gone into obstetrics, I love seeing those leetle babies come out. I love starting IVs on those pregnant women, their veins so fat from the progesterone.”

But as she talks, we both realize that I am dangerously far away.

When the plane touches down, I imagine walking off into the streets of San Francisco on my own. I put down the conference brochure and let it fall from the armrest, half unheeded.

“Why don’t you just pour water all over this?” She raises her glass to the syllabus and dribbles water onto the red ink. We watch the colors bleed. “Why not just drown the whole thing before you even arrive?” Her whisper is savage in my ear as the plane pulls us across the continent to San Francisco.

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