It hasn’t really hit me yet.  I’m sitting here at forty thousand feet in that sunny expanse I’ve been desperately staring into for the past two months.  From this view the clouds look like small sea salt pillars poking out the blue floor of a diorama.  At this height you can even see the shadow they throw on the surface of the ocean below, as if they were some comprehensible size, like a bush in the planter beside the curb where we walk.  The little girl in front of me insists on bouncing against her seat in a thrashing motion that threatens to transform my fold-out tray into a makeshift catapult for my coffee.  Coffee that I need.  So badly.  I wonder what the sunset will look like from here.

Uh oh, they’re handing out immigration cards.  I heard Ray got detained in Jakarta for over seven hours until the host finally came to his rescue.  I made a mental note to dress as anti-terrorist as possible and here we are in Jay-Z all black everything.  Sht.  That’s a sure sign I’ve been sitting in the LA/NY fashion scene too long.  God I’m not trying to spend the night with an overzealous customs officer who doesn’t understand why the dark knight is carrying a thousand flame-orange wristbands.  Nice one, Raf Simons.  

Maybe it’s because I’ve just spent the last day and a half riding airplanes and waiting in that milky greenhouse they call Incheon Airport.  I haven’t even touched down in my first actual city of this Asia tour.  So it hasn’t registered yet…that I’m writing that new chapter people always talk about.  And when I finally hit the tarmac in LA I’m not going back to life as usual.  I’ve eyed the edge of the nest.

And now it’s fly or die.