Exit Left to Your Destiny.

It was clear this man knew he was important, yet he didn’t seem to be concerned for what felt like his lack of a knowing how he appeared without a clean shave. He sat and settled himself on the plane, not once stopping to look anyone straight in the face. Perhaps his guilt he feared would be plastered as pity in any honest gaze he didn’t care to make. We both ordered a whiskey as if to salute a fate we weren’t ready to accept. Elbow to elbow we were bound to impact one another in this moment of a give and take.

The air was thick, and it slowed my regard to begin his destination which lived in this one conversation. Where are you headed, I asked knowing better than he? Home, I read his eyes like a lie but perhaps they knew more than me. I bet you can’t wait to get back, he nodded without asking for any response from me. Home has changed a thousand times throughout a thousand measures of what I assumed home could be, he let the words trickle off slowly as he intended his sentiment to be.

Now I felt the heaviness of his wickedness. He had me were he wanted me to be, but I held the secret to his destiny. So, I remained quiet unrelentless to knowing I couldn’t save his sovereignty. I blinked distinctively but I was denied any credibility by the enormous thunder that hit the air of the only circumstance we ever shared. Nothing could hit him deeper than his own reality which I knew wouldn’t involve me.

Are you afraid of the end he inquired cynically? I’m only frightened of an end I don’t feel prepared to testify to, I said matter-of-factly. He swigged down the last of his whiskey, then quietly said what a defiant testimony I’m making toward my own conceived notion of freedom. A freedom I’ve created in my own acts of authenticity. He exited without ever knowing the same kind of validity into the cage of his own inhibitions. I left quite differently.