Zipping Through Alaska

The black duffel bag has been going around for twenty-three minutes.

I know because I've been watching it, and I know because I've been counting. It's the same bag every time it rounds the corner by the far wall, the one with the broken zipper pull and the fraying strap that someone taped together with a strip of red duct tape. Red tape on a black bag. Like a wound somebody tried to fix and didn't quite manage.

Nobody is coming for it. Nobody standing at this carousel is looking at that bag. They're all watching for their own things, shifting their weight from foot to foot, arms crossed, eyes scanning. They're annoyed. The carousel is too slow, the wait is too long, the airport is too loud or too cold or too something. It's never enough. The machine just keeps moving anyway, blades bending around the corners, the whole mechanism groaning quietly under the weight of other people's lives.

I sit on the hard plastic bench along the wall and think about how I've spent the last seven years being that black duffel bag. Just going around and around. Showing up. Taking up space. Waiting for someone to finally look over and say, oh, that's mine.

Nobody ever does.

My phone buzzes against my thigh and I already know who it is before I look.

Don't forget the cake from Martino's. The vanilla one with the buttercream. And Emma, please, for the party tonight — maybe make sure you change your clothes and brush your hair? Just, you know. Look happy. For your sister.

I read it twice. Then I put the phone face-down on the bench beside me.

Look happy. For your sister. My mother has a gift for packing an entire philosophy of disappointment into a single text message. I've been sitting here in this airport for forty minutes doing nothing but waiting for a friend's delayed connection, which got canceled twenty minutes ago, and somehow I've still managed to fail some invisible test I didn't know I was taking. I should be getting the cake. I should be going home and changing into something that says I have it together when I do not, in any meaningful way, have it together.

Dr. Chen would say I'm being hard on myself. He'd lean back in his chair with that calm, measured expression and fold his hands in his lap and say something about clouds moving across a sky, about how my thoughts are not facts. I've been seeing Dr. Chen for two years. I know the script. I can perform the mindfulness exercise and I can identify my cognitive distortions and I can name the specific brand of grey numbness that settles in my chest most mornings like weather that forgot to move on.

Knowing the vocabulary of your damage doesn't fix the damage. That's the thing nobody tells you.

The black bag rounds the corner again. I watch the flexible belt shift under it, the way the whole system adjusts and compensates, the way years of oversized suitcases and dropped hard cases and careless handling have worn the surface down but the mechanism underneath still works. Still moves. Still carries everything it's given from one point to the next without complaint, without recognition, without anyone stopping to say, hey, good job, you're doing a really thankless thing here.

I've thought about not doing it anymore. The moving, the carrying, the going through the motions. I've thought about it more times than I could honestly count and I've never once had the nerve to follow through, which my mother would probably say makes me a coward in one direction or the other. She told me once that only cowards end things early. I've spent a lot of years wondering if the cowardice is in the leaving or in the staying. I still don't have a clean answer.

My phone buzzes again. Jenna this time.

Em!! Brad and I have NEWS. Like, big news. You HAVE to come tonight, I'm dying. Where are you??

I stare at the message. Jenna has always had news. She graduated first, got the job first, married Brad who is objectively perfect in the way that people who played varsity sports in high school and then got sensible degrees and became physical therapists are perfect. She lights up rooms. She's blonde in the way that seems effortless and earnest at the same time. Her news is always good news, the kind that gets written on a chalkboard and photographed and shared widely. I love her. I love her the way you love someone when you're standing in their shadow long enough that the shadow starts to feel like the only weather you know.

I'm twenty-five years old and I'm so tired of being tired.

I set the phone face-down again and look at my email instead, because some part of my brain is apparently running a parallel operation without my full consent. I opened the email three days ago and have been letting it sit there, marinating, like I was waiting for something. The subject line reads: Seasonal Position Confirmation Pending — Skagway, Alaska.

I found the listing two weeks ago while I was supposed to be shelving the large-print fiction section at the library. Zipline guide. Seasonal. May through September. Room and board included. No experience required, full training provided. They wanted people who were good with people, physically capable, not afraid of heights.

I am deeply afraid of heights. I shelve books for a living and run story time for a group of four-year-olds on Tuesday mornings. My relevant skills are limited.

But I filled out the application anyway, at midnight, on my kitchen floor, eating cereal out of the box because I hadn't properly eaten dinner in four days and the cereal felt like the most manageable option. I filled it out and I submitted it and then I went to bed and didn't sleep and told myself it didn't matter because they'd never actually respond.

They responded.

And now I'm sitting in an airport watching a broken black bag go around a carousel that never stops moving, and my mother wants me to pick up a cake, and my sister has big news, and I am twenty-five years old and I cannot remember the last morning I woke up and felt something other than the grey.

I open the email. I read it again. The salary is modest. The hours are long. The landscape in the attached photos is so aggressively, almost violently beautiful that looking at it feels like a provocation. Mountains that go up forever, the kind of up that makes flat southern Indiana feel like a joke. Water so blue it looks invented. Trees so dense and dark they look like they're keeping secrets.

Nobody in Skagway, Alaska knows that I've spent the better part of three years thinking about all the different ways a person could stop being a burden. Nobody there knows my sister's name or my mother's expectations or the particular way my therapist tilts his head when he's waiting for me to admit something I don't want to admit. Nobody knows any of it.

That thought hits me somewhere below the sternum, cold and clean and sudden, like swallowing ice water too fast.

I could just be someone else there. Or more accurately, I could try to find out if there's a version of me worth being.

I hit reply before I let myself think about it. My thumbs move fast, the way they do when I'm doing something I know I'll second-guess if I slow down.

Hello, I'd like to confirm my acceptance of the seasonal zipline guide position beginning May 12th. Please let me know what information you need from me. Thank you, Emma Calloway.

I press send.

For a long moment I just sit there. The carousel keeps moving. The black duffel bag rounds the corner again. Somewhere behind me a child is crying about something and a man is on a phone call he should probably be having somewhere more private.

My phone buzzes with an automated reply almost immediately. Welcome to the Skagway Alpine Adventures team! We're thrilled to have you on board for the upcoming season. There's a list of documents to submit, a housing confirmation, a packing list that includes the phrase "rain gear is non-negotiable."

I read the words welcome to the team and feel something shift, very slightly, in the grey. Not gone. Just shifted. Like a window opening somewhere in a house that's been closed up all winter.

I find the Starbucks near the security exit and order a coffee I can't really afford and sit down with my laptop and look up Skagway, Alaska for the next two hours with the focused, slightly manic energy of someone who has just made a decision that might be the bravest or most reckless thing they've ever done and isn't entirely sure which.

Population around a thousand. At the top of the Lynn Canal. Gateway to the Klondike Gold Rush. The White Pass and Yukon Route railway. Cruise ships that bring several thousand visitors a day in the summer season, which is apparently the only season that exists up there in any meaningful way. The winters are a whole different story, a story I won't be part of. I'll be gone before the snow comes.

The photos keep stopping me. I click on one and sit with it longer than makes sense. A trail through spruce trees, the light coming through at an angle that makes everything look like it's glowing from the inside. A glacier, blue-white, sitting between mountains like it belongs there, like it's been there since before the concept of belonging was invented. A zipline platform in the tree canopy, high above the forest floor, and a guide in a helmet and harness grinning at the camera with the kind of grin that suggests they've stopped being afraid of the height and started being grateful for it instead.

I want that. I don't even know how to want things properly anymore, but I want that.

My phone buzzes. Jenna again.

Em? You okay? Mom said you were at the airport? What's going on?

I type back slowly this time.

Hey, I'm really sorry. I can't make it tonight. Something came up, kind of an emergency. Give me a call this week and you can tell me the news. I'm sorry, I love you.

I stare at the word emergency for a second. It's not entirely a lie. It is, in fact, the most truthful thing I could say. The emergency is me. The emergency has been me for a while now, and this is the first time I've done anything about it other than sitting on a bench watching the carousel go around.

Jenna responds with a string of question marks and then a heart emoji and then: okay, are you SURE you're okay??

I'm fine. I promise. I love you.

I close the messages and open the airline app before the guilt can organize itself into something that stops me. Juneau is the nearest major airport. From Juneau there are small connecting flights to Skagway. I look at the prices and feel my stomach drop in a way that has nothing to do with heights. I have the money, technically. I've been saving without any particular purpose for two years, money that was theoretically for something but never had a destination. It has one now.

I book the one-way flight to Juneau.

One-way. I sit with that for a moment. The departure date is twelve days from now, which gives me just enough time to handle the library, deal with my apartment, and figure out what a person actually needs to survive an Alaskan summer. The rain gear, apparently. Non-negotiable.

The confirmation email lands in my inbox and I read it three times like it might disappear if I look away. It doesn't disappear. The flight is real. The job acceptance is real. The automated welcome message is still sitting in my inbox telling me they're thrilled to have me on board.

I close the laptop and drink the last of my coffee, which has gone cold while I was busy dismantling my life and putting it back together in a completely different shape. Outside the airport windows the afternoon light is flat and grey, the particular shade of Indiana spring that never quite commits to being anything. The parking lot stretches out endlessly, cars lined up in rows, everything organized and predictable and exactly where someone told it to be.

I think about the glacier in the photo. The way it sat between those mountains like it had earned its place there. Like it had survived enough pressure and time and cold to become something undeniable.

I pick up my bag. I walk back past the baggage claim on my way to the exit. The carousel is still moving. The black duffel bag with the red tape is still going around, still unclaimed, still showing up every forty-five seconds with the patient, battered consistency of something that doesn't know how to stop.

I stop for just a second and look at it.

Then I walk out of the airport into the flat grey afternoon, and for the first time in longer than I can honestly remember, the grey feels like something I'm moving through rather than something I'm made of.