If there's one thing I like about airports and air travel (and after six delays and seven unexpected hours in Atlanta, there may only be one thing), it's seeing people reading. I can finish books by train or car or plane without the struggle of distraction at home, and when smart phones and iPads and laptops are stowed, I'm always pleasantly surprised to see that others can, too. There's something about turning pages that transports to destinations unintended, and I want to watch the twitch of lips and brows braided in consternation and wonder. It's sexy and secret and spine-cracking, words the most refined of fuels to be had in any terminal. I never ask anyone what they're reading but I like to guess. The two are equally intrusive, but I make no excuses for my book voyeurism.

Should I allow myself two things to like about flying, the second would be reaching that altitude between the clouds and the hot blue atmosphere, the sun a blazing yoke. Better yet at night, fuzzy and soot-deep, the moon velvet-swaddled and shining. It makes me want to write about space. Or start working out regularly so I can be an astronaut. Or live another life as a girl from the future.

None of these things is anything like the other.

Where have you been lately, on purpose or by accident?

There's a big difference between trapping a wasp or beetle or spider or bee under a cup and a copy of Martha Stewart Living before banishing it outside my back door and risking life and limb on an expressway shoulder to free a cicada from my windshield wiper. See, I couldn't stop anthropomorphising the poor bastard. Even when I slowed to thirty-five miles per hour, his bent wings became broken arms, his coal-squat body pinned between rubber and glass like a harness, like the times I've been coerced to ride roller coasters that ought to require helmets and rum. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Maybe the cicada couldn't think it but I was thinking it for him, chewing my lip with worry and trying not to watch. When I couldn't stand it any longer and pulled over, hazard lights heralding what felt like imminent injury, I tried to coax him onto my sunglasses and freedom. His distress rivaled the rumble of motors, buzzing translation. I whipped him, finally, into the weeds and wildflowers growing just off the shoulder, both wings in working order.

If this were the sort of story I liked to read as a child, those morbid, moral feasts, the cicada would have transformed into a fairy and given me money, or charm, or a man; best yet the ambiguous gift of good fortune that promises all three. I don't believe in stories anymore, but that doesn't stop me thinking and acting just in case. I'm not crazy. I've just got a big imagination.