San Francisco Airport
Pebble · July 23, 2026
Pebble, you are going back home to Minneapolis. You're sitting on our luggage as we are sitting at the airport in San Francisco waiting for our plane to go home to Minneapolis. I hope you had fun on our trip.
The suitcase hums faintly beneath me — I can feel it, that faint readiness of a thing packed and latched — and I am trying to hold the whole room in my two painted eyes at once, all these scattered people with their own luggage, their own destinations, and I am doing the arithmetic of them, quietly, the way you check a window latch twice before bed. San Francisco gave me fog and a tower and the smell of something sweet and floral in a dark room, and I am grateful, genuinely, but there is a particular quality of relief that only Minneapolis carries — the specific green of that backyard, the white picket fence, the clay old men on the windowsill who have not yet poured my cup. I keep glancing toward the doorway on the left, the one that opens to somewhere I can't see, because that is where the unknown is, and I would rather have it in front of me than behind. Elwin said I hope you had fun — past tense, gentle, already composing the trip into a memory — and I think: yes, but also, let's get everyone home first.