Empty Glass
- Apr 25, 2025
- 4 min read
by Tex Gresham
Where are you going?
You are up here, the pressure of the air out there is in your bones. The bodies around you and you, all moving from where you were to where you are going.
A destination connected by the air at 30,000 feet.
You have to obey the laws at 30,000 feet.
Sit still and just sit.
Forfeit yourself at the cabin door and become a child at the whim of an absentee parent who’s not against treating you like the child they never wanted.
Become the child of the pilots and flight attendants and the magic that keeps the plane up and not crashing down.
A flight attendant gives you a free drink with a wink that says You deserve it, sweetheart. We’re all so proud of you.
All is right in the world.
God smiles upon you, this small glass of tequila.
Nothing can change this.
The free drink is proof that blessings can be real.
Blessings are hard to come by and even harder to accept, so you try to endure them like a hug from a father who never says I love you and means it.
Those are the words tequila isn’t afraid to say and you feel them words burn as they crawl down your craw and into your gut.
Into your blood.
Sometimes things get into your blood and change you for the better, make you realize the way you’ve been living has been as harmful as a rusty nail in the eye — one you couldn’t see.
You could pull it out and change if you knew how to pull it out and change.
But sometimes things get into your blood — forced in there like a blade you saw but couldn’t stop — and what you’re left with is a lingering virus you’ll never be able to rid yourself of until you find a cure — a cure that never wants to be found.
The strength is in the finding though.
The finding is hard work — a job most of us call out sick for more than show up and commit to.
Sometimes we are all sick.
Most people have never smelled their own sickness but are so focused on smelling the disease of others they ignore the funk cloud that shrouds them like that hug from a father who never says I love you and means it — but also now a mother who says We are so proud of you that you don’t believe because it doesn’t feel earned.
There’s a madness in not acknowledging the stink of one’s self.
When you dive deep into this stink at 30,000 feet and haven’t paid for the wi-fi, there’s nothing to distract and all that’s left is to sift through the smell and recognize the genre of filth you carry.
the death inside you
that you pass into me
A passenger — another child like you — sings this from a seat far back. Near the bathroom.
And you think Amen.
All of this — these words you absently scratch with a pen that’s running out of ink — is an inadequate distraction from the fact that you miss someone who you can’t tell that you miss. They are too far from you now. Moving, cutting through the unseen that carries, cutting and making a distance, a distance collapsing into nothing.
Because they are no longer a destination on a map you hold.
Because grieving the loss of someone isn’t just a diminishing of space. It’s a constantly ricocheting reminder that the sadness becomes one of those blood infections that pumps through the heart undiscovered until its stage four — too late to cut out.
It’s a stink that starts in our bones and can’t be cleaned. Can’t be cut out. And at 30,000 feet the pressure of the air out there makes that stink seep out like a toxic cloud.
Sometimes we go to grave with that comfortable poison in our marrow. Comfortable with that stench. Comfortable with the drink we were gifted, the drink we thought was a blessing, the drink gone dry, the cup gone to shards, the shards gone down our throat and leaving lines in flesh in all the places we cannot see. Inside.
And you — you will carry on like that. Poisoned, cut inside, empty glassed and wanting. Carry on like that until 30,000 years from now when your bones are found in the depths of whatever valley your death has made. And in that valley those future grave robbers will look at the hollow spaces you left behind and say —
This was an empty glass at 30,000 feet in need of another drink — a drink that never came.
In the time between Now and the time when your unimportance will be forgotten and the imprint you leave in the dirt becomes a message for what’s left when the world leaves, you will write this on your knees —
If this were a suicide note, I would only blame myself. But it’s not. It’s an invitation to you because I loved the drink that was in your bones.
Where have you gone?
Tex Gresham is a writer and filmmaker. His books include Sunflower, Violent Candy, and POP! (with KKUURRTT). He lives in Los Angeles. www.squeakypig.com
