TO PITTSBURGH: (on a plane) (April 2, 2014)

I did not wake up on time. Sometimes I feel tired of going to an airport to get in an airplane. I used to love to fly (and I still aspire to fly), but after many years of gypsy-style traveling, it can become tiresome. I woke up late and my cab driver was also late. My thoughts were heavily pointing towards forgetting about Pittsburgh and just taking a nap or going for a run under the Chapel Hill sun. My thoughts usually convince me, so I went back to my room and sat in the couch. "This is over," I told myself while I was staring at a picture of a child version of me that I have on my desk. Then a ringtone, Spinetta music, "Bajan," a deep voice in the other side asking me if I still need a taxi.

Why did i say "yes"? Why do people say ever "yes"?

I am on a cab with a rugged skinhead old man. His name is Sam. He is 60. He seems like a tough guy. He is from South Africa. He has been married several times. He has five kids. His current wife is 28 and "she is good at saving money," she also drives the cab and understands Sam's points of view... The current wife of Sam is practical and that is good, according to him, because he is 60, "I'm sixty and that is good for me now," he says. I keep asking him questions, I do my detectivish job: he looks like a character, like a suspect. He has lived in Pakistan, Israel, Greece, Texas, and North Carolina. He was born jewish but converted to islam in 1979. He shows me a picture of himself when he was 24: he looks like a happy young man: behind the steering wheel he does not look happy at all. He tells me that he is an artist and shows me lots of colorful pictures. I like the pictures, they seem made by someone on LSD. He tells me that he uses markers, but he does not have enough time to devote to his art, "I don't have enough time to do my art," Sam says. I ask him about his past wives. He remains silent for a while, "he is going back to his past," I think. Then he says, smiling, that "you always miss women from your past, they all had something good...". He smiles again and adds that he became better at understanding women when he turned 50. I say something stupid, his last statement does not give me many hopes. I do not have many hopes. Before I jump out of the cab to run to check in, I ask Sam how he dealt with his separations. He stares at me and says, almost smiling, "That was very difficult, I learned that through what I study, so now I can tell you that everything, the world, everything, has been already planned, so if a terrible thing happens in your life, you should not get extremely sad, because it was supposed to happen, and if something really good happens in your life, you should not get extremely happy, because it was also meant to happen that way...". He gives me his business card and I promise to call him next time I need a ride to the airport... I'm late, my airplane to Pittsburgh is gone, but I do not feel neither desperate nor annoyed. I go to the US Airways desk and a kind lady named Lisa puts me in the next flight to Philadelphia. I am going now to Philadelphia to catch a connection to Pittsburgh. It was supposed to happen this way. My life was supposed to happen this way, it was planned: like the sea of clouds outside of this airplane to Philadelphia. I think that soon I am leaving Chapel Hill to move to Pittsburgh, a place where I practically do not know anyone. I have spent the last ten years of my life moving to one place to another, because it was planned that way, because it was the only way that it could've been planned. Ten years, six different universities, many cities, a plan: ten years and I do not have a home anymore, I do not have a place to go, I do not want to go to any place, I have no attachments to anywhere or anyone. The past is crowded with strangers and familiar faces that overtime have become strangers as well... And following the plan, because I was supposed to carry the "Mourning Diary" of Barthes on my way to Philadelphia, I open it in today's date, p. 109:

"April 2, 1978

What have I to lose now that I've lost my Reason for living-the Reason to fear for someone's life."

But everything was already planned, including mourning and losing those Reasons, losing also the old and the new encounters, losing what we have not even gained, because losing was already planned. TURBULENCE, the airplane shakes like hell and I wish that the fucking plane crashes, because that could also be part of the plan. The plan contains everything. Everything.