They Walked Away

 

What do you do when your family, the people you love more than anything, walk away from you? How do you react, especially when you believe that there’s been misunderstanding, deception and skullduggery? How do you process that tsunami of emotions;  the sadness, hurt and anger? What do you do with those feelings of helplessness and despair…?

I’ve started this story a dozen times over the past two and a half years, wanting for some reason to try to capture the pain, to paint it on a surface where I might stare at it from a distance. Stare and maybe gain a little perspective, find a bit of understanding.

I start writing but I always become overwhelmed. I become frustrated and bogged down. I stop. There’s just too much to say, so much I want people to know. Words I want to mail, words I want to recall. And sometimes I don’t want people to know anything. I just want to melt into the ground, to fall asleep and never wake up again.

Then there’s the dream- that crazy premonition dream I kept having a year or two before the actual event.

Actually, nightmare would be a more accurate term. On more than one occasion I’d wake up crying like a baby and need to Skype home to assure myself that all was okay.

Some might say that’s spooky, a sort of psychic occurrence. But the more likely answer is much more mundane: I must have recognized a developing pattern. Recognized, fretted, worried but I was obviously unable to surface my concerns into my conscious mind, to head ‘em off at the pass, to prevent the calamity that was about to unfold upon my own little corner of the universe.

Perhaps that’s a good place to start. The dream. Maybe this time I’ll skip the backstory, the setup, the context and I’ll try to just cut right to the chase.

I was flying an Airbus A320 on contract for a budget airline in China when I started having the dream. We had these absolutely dreadful rides in austere crew vans- movement from anonymous airports to cheap crew hotels. The trips were long and uncomfortable, we were always jetlagged, so tired that every action, every word was painful. The buses were spartan and as dirty as only the Chinese can manage.

That, superficially, might sound racist. I’ll risk that perception because there’s really no way around the facts. The vans, the airplanes and the hotels- were incredibly filthy. The other pilots (the Chinese ones) smoked in the flight decks, something that was technically illegal but widely practised.

Whenever I signed out one of the airline’s new A320s I’d have to take wet wipes to every surface I was about to touch. The airplanes were fresh from Toulouse- usually with only a couple hundred hours on the airframe, but everything would already be covered in brown gunge. The stench was so bad that you could smell it on your uniform shirts the next laundry day.

But again I digress.

The dream always took place in a crew van, me strapped in at the captain’s place- to the left and in one of the front rows of the multi-passenger vehicles. The rest of the crew would be Chinese kids- an FO in his late 20s or early 30s and FAs and security kids (here we’d call them In Flight Security Officers) -all in their early to mid twenties.

There might be chit chat, the odd joke, a bit of laughter. But it would always be in Chinese- no effort was ever made to include me in the conversation. I was treated with a tremendous amount of respect and deference, but no matter how friendly I tried to be- I might as well have been a three-headed alien from outer space.

Where the dream parted ways with the reality of my China adventure was in the route that the crew van used enroute to wherever it was that we were going. In my dream it drove past my house in Canada. My dream house, my grand country home- the one I designed myself and named “Captain’s Folly” (another premonition, I guess.)

In my dream my wife and three kids would be playing in the yard. Playing happily, seemingly unconcerned about my wellbeing or even my very existence. They were always laughing, making little kid noises, playing silly games- having a grand old time- all without me.

Always at this point in the dream I would start waving to my happy little family. I would try to open the window, to call out- to tell them that I loved them and that I would be home soon.

But the windows would never open. I’d fumble, bang, cajole, plead and curse. However hard I tried- I could never get those damn windows to open. And of course the glass was tinted and glazed such that on the other side my family could never see me, would not know that I was struggling so hard to return to be with them.

The bus always continued along its herky-jerky route, me stuck in its filthy cabin breathing second-hand smoke and smelling suspicious odours of rotting, left-over food and sweaty, little bodies. The driver would never answer my requests to stop and let me out. The windows would never open. Nobody would ever see or understand my need to be with my family.

In real life the China adventure eventually came to an end. I returned with a sack of cash and lavished that upon my spouse and kids. I bought gifts, trinkets, everyone got ipads and new computers. There were expensive vacations- beachfront villas in Barbados, sky’s-the-limit Caribbean cruises for all.

But, in my absence something had changed. My oldest had begun to usurp my patriarchal territory. My wife, I would later discover, had joined eHarmony. My younger two had become distant teens. In reality I still rode in a Chinese crew van of sorts- only this time- one that seemed to pass within the very hallways of my own home.

But the van windows would still not open. Nobody on the outside seemed to be aware of my efforts to rejoin, to reconnect with my family. The world appeared to motor on without me and who knows where the hell I was destined.

A few months later they left.

There was a family meeting of sorts. I remember angry voices, accusations being levelled that I “just didn’t get it.” To which I would counter “Get what?!” But nobody could ever explain what that meant. No one could never shine a light upon their discontent with me.

One day a truck rolled up, people loaded the better furniture. They left without me.

Almost three years have passed. I am physically home in a rental apartment in my little town in Canada. My ex-wife and three children live only a few kilometres away.  But now there is more distance than ever.

I’ve missed teenage triumphs, first boyfriends and learning to drive. I’ve missed the end of high school and graduation. In my small bachelor apartment one of my kitchen cupboards has cookie ingredients from two Christmases ago. Two Christmases ago from that time when I became so excited that my daughter was to come over that I spent $60 on sweets and components.

She never came. The cookies were never baked.

Now I spend holidays with my brother’s family. The money has gone to the lawyers, there are no more ipads, no new computers nor cruises. I send messages that usually don’t receive replies. Father’s Day passed and I never heard a peep from my offspring.

I'm still stuck in that Chinese crew van even though this is obviously Canada. It’s a bit more comfortable here, the air is cleaner, nobody smokes and the filth and smells are my own.

But I still stare out a window and wave at a world going by without me.

And still- nobody waves back.