You couldn't say no. Say maybe. Everybody said maybe.
Except those with partners, cynical stage. Headphones.
Maybe not quite what you thought, different, obvious, sexy motherfucker shaking that ass. And all that.
Something about something about something made sense, and then it didn't. Then it did again. It was all curcumstances.

Airport 2001.
Election led to revolution, to a ludo game with John Lennon and Che Guevara. Power, ego, dignity and chaos.
Imagination, Greek legends, and post futurism. Moonlander.
Oslo, Bologna, St Etienne, coming soon.
Writing in lists, waiting.

Swapping his gherkin for her tomato, they'd been going out over a year. Burger adjustments were the sign of routine amity. They'd maybe shared one spoon for a crème bruleé in a nice Islington restaurant where he'd picked up the tab in exchange for some concert tickets, or some other kind of shared cultural experience.
Straight down the middle of the runway, or had they taken off ? Were they flying on autopilot on the budget airline where there would be no fruit salad to swap the kiwi slice for the orange segment and maybe feed it to each other.
White leather jacket, pink rucksack, sixteen and Danish; that's about where it was. People watching and waiting in the metro café bar in the high ceilinged octagonal shaded Stansted.

And it was up.

In the Air, the nostalgic headset. Someone who's hand you could hold on an eight hour transatlantic flight, have champagne, be upgraded and think this was going to be the maddest two weeks of life.
But there was madder. Things got torn apart and there were reasons for it, and although there was no hand holding, there was a personally liberated spin.
Turbulence maybe, and still uncomfortable thinking about things, take it back five weeks and there was a choked impossibility, six anger, seven or eight, true love and not the slightest inkling that anything was about to go tits up.

The Boeing 737 was going to a foreign country, full of young art students and budget snowboarders wildly not going anywhere near a mountain, but you couldn't always have it all, you could get things wrong, make a fucking mistake, shock horror! And an exclamation mark as well.

Everything would settle, if choked impossibility folded in five but for the odd introspective ramble in a countryside you weren't allowed to visit for fear of putting your foot in your mouth and infecting a poor overanalogised sheep who spotted greener grass from the moral highground.