I've never been seasick. I know, however, that seasickness is terrible. I've seen people seasick. Friends, you know. It's a miserable thing that folds you over the side of the boat, heaving and dizzy. I play with seasickness sometimes. Imagining that it's got me, that I'm beginning to feel that heaviness in my throat and that uneasy lurching in my belly. And then for a moment, maybe I really am seasick. Maybe. But I'll never know, because the experiment ends there. I stop imagining, and just like that I stop being sick.

You drop me off at the airport, and I feel a hollowness after you hug me. At the security checkpoint I'm selected for additional screening, and so a middle aged man in a blue uniform wipes my hands with a special cloth, then puts the cloth into a machine. When I'm cleared, I heft my bag and march soundlessly to my gate. I feel some panic realizing that I don't have a book with me. The bestsellers in the gift shop are lifeless, as if from another planet. I handle them with numb hands, my eyes jerking across the back covers with the plaintive chk, chk of a broken record. And then I'm back at the gate, empty handed. For a tiny moment, I imagine what it might feel like to be heartbroken. And then in a rush I try to stop imagining. But it's not so easy.