On a Raft Floating in the Middle of the Universe

A food fight had broken out on the plane. Dripping, messy musicians stood giggling helplessly at one another. A morose, dreamy girl sat in the back. Her eyes drifted away. The luxury jet screamed through the clouds in a triumph of modern engineering. She was the gilded passenger. And her life, she started to believe, was a gilded cage.

It had all started with that enigmatic janitor. Drawing her out, changing her perspective. Damn him! Damn him forever! Her life wasn't perfect but she could've been satisfied in her misery. She thought she had everything in place. Now she was at the end of one long chain reaction taking her from her receptionist's chair to 30,000 feet in the sky.

Her marriage had been wrong. She knew that. But she didn't have to admit it! Would have been a good thing to hang on to. Have two kids, live in the suburbs. A nice comfortable lie. But she had grown past all that because of the wry and passionate observations of a man who seemed to know her without her ever breathing a word. She truly had had dreams of a better life. A real life, the one she believed in as a child. Alas, no way to put that genie back in the bottle.

The band's song blasted through the plane's sound system. "Life is just a fantasy. Can you live this fantasy life?" Stars faded within her eyes. Yes, she had made the decision to acknowledge her gifts - gifts the Janitor Man had seen so clearly. But had she come all this way just to be used up all over again? She knew the answer to that too.

But I'm trapped, a slave to the good life. I can't live off $7.50 an hour again. No one but my sister will talk to me since I hooked onto the band. Dear God, when I prayed to You faithfully, I made bad decisions. When I stopped all prayers, I still made bad decisions. All life slips through my fingertips. Just let the plane crash and I can die a quick and painless death. Since her lie had died, she felt she had to as well.

The dread hand of Darkness reached coldly once more for her heart. Not again. Had she even the right to hope for hope? The movie played out once more in her mind. Driving to the airport, there in the street, a glimmer of recognition in that bum's eyes. Immediately she thought "Janitor Man!" Two souls stared into one another; old dreams roared back to life. Had she just dreamt it all? No matter. One thing her anger knew for certain: there was no future with him.