between clouds and ground

I was planning to write to get it all out...at the end of the day writing to me is the most expressive form of all, my truest language, my most honest voice. But I couldn't. Had two long flights so I packed a moleskin with virgin pages waiting to be filled, a pen that felt right in my hand, even my phone with its endless blank documents—still couldn't write. The words stayed locked inside, prisoners of whatever was happening to me at 30,000 feet.

Spent the flight fighting immense nausea, my body rebelling against the unnatural act of hurtling through sky in a metal tube. But I enjoyed the view above the sea way more than I should have...because for the duration of the flight nothing mattered. No one knew who I am, neither did I. It was like my past choices, trauma and scars never existed, dissolved in the thin air between earth and heaven.

I was suspended in a space where identity becomes optional, where history loses its grip, where the weight of being myself simply evaporated into the endless blue below. A temporary amnesia that felt more like grace than loss.

Probably why I couldn't stop tears from running down my face when landing. The return to gravity meant the return to myself, to the accumulated weight of all the days that led me to that plane. The descent back into being someone with a past, with unhealed wounds, with a body that remembers what I'd rather forget.

Got in touch with the part of me I didn't know existed—the part that did retail therapy. I mean yeah, I like pampering myself, but I went overboard...okay way overboard. Each purchase a small rebellion against feeling empty, each transaction a temporary filling of whatever void had opened up during those hours of suspended existence.

I couldn't figure out if it's because I've been sick this whole trip—the nausea didn't end when I landed and insomnia hit like crazy, turning days and nights into indistinguishable stretches of discomfort—or was it because I was filling a gap one purchase at a time, trying to buy back the peace I'd tasted at altitude.

Either way, I'm grateful I get to buy stuff and grateful for my hotel room honestly. I hide in it whenever life gets overwhelming, this temporary sanctuary with its heavy curtains and climate control, where I can regulate everything except what's happening inside me.

Brother came by, booked a room beside mine, and he's been helpful honestly. He noticed I'm not okay—something in my eyes or the way I move through space must have given me away—so he's been really nice. Sometimes it takes going far from home to rediscover that the people who've known you longest can still surprise you with their capacity to care when you need it most.

A trip to Chanel was needed—that gravitational pull toward luxury that promises to fill whatever emptiness retail therapy had temporarily soothed. But thankfully he prevented me from proceeding, stepping in with the wise intervention of someone who recognizes dangerous impulses. Then he surprised me by agreeing to get me the bag as a med school graduation gift, which is surprisingly soon—it's really coming to an end, I guess. The years of studying, the sleepless nights, the constant pressure, all culminating in a piece of paper that says "you did it kiddo".

Anyways, here I am sipping on my Ovaltine as nausea lurks in the background like an unwelcome companion that refuses to leave. The familiar taste provides a small comfort, a tether to normalcy when everything else feels unmoored. I should check out of my beloved room and venture to another part of town where he booked me a suite, ensuring I can still cocoon myself when the world becomes too much to bear.

Will miss having the spa two floors beneath me though—that convenient sanctuary where I could disappear into steam and silence whenever the weight of existence pressed too heavily. But the one at the other hotel is supposedly bougie-er, he assures me, as if luxury could somehow upgrade the quality of my retreat from reality.