Lost in Transition

           The seventeen-seat metal bird that had carried us from Nadi to Taveuni made its final landing in the hidden, modest airport.  The purring jet engine was droned out by the raindrops seeping down seat A12’s window.  The window kept me from falling victim to traveler’s fatigue.  Each tropical raindrop that waltzed down the maze of traced paths seemed to clear away a clotted spot in my mind.  My hands could barely hold my camera tightly enough from the thin, cold, circulated air.  My nose felt every stimulating breath of it.  And as miniscule as details around me seemed to keep me from drifting off, I had never felt so strongly a sense of captivation.  There’s beauty in unrestricted, sincere observation.
            The deteriorating wasteland being eaten by concrete parasites seemed  a state of destruction unobtainable here.  As successful and advanced my metal encrusted home claimed to be, I had never felt so in a state of awe as I did now.  Every image passing through my eyes, I felt slowly swayed by.  And I had given up on trying to capture this all through my camera lens.  The plane ride took me farther than just point A to point B.  It became a mediating station where I could either stay numbed by pixels and frequencies or start fresh.
            The hours I had spent mindlessly staring into a computer screen and miles my fingers had traveled on the keyboard had taken their tole.  I felt like sections of my brain had been degraded to white noise.  Despite the already permanent override I had endured there still had to be something left right?  No program could duplicate what I was seeing, and hearing.
            The past 23 hours were easily divided into periods of transition.  From San Francisco to the South Pacific had been ten hours of being hypnotized by the sound of my i-pod, the claustrophobic atmosphere of the two-story plane and the smell of hand sanitizer.  To the Westernized airport of Nadi where locals walked completely erect from station to station, plugging numbers into computers in stiff attire unnaturally hanging to their frames.  And now I tried to reformat as much of myself as I could on this turbulent, 2-hour span of absorption and interpretation.  But at the time I didn’t realize how much harder it would be to retrace my steps back home.