Cut from what I'm working on now

“Sooo…” he said, finally turning towards her, his belongings arranged. “Sorry, I’m actually…I get a little weird on planes. I’m more of a train guy, but no one takes those any more.”

            “In Europe they do. I take trains all the time.”

            “I’d like to live in Europe,” he said, his comment coming out uncharacteristically vague. “You’re in Amsterdam?”

            “Paris, actually. My sister’s in Amsterdam though, so I go a lot. I teach at one of the art schools there, so. And you’re…in the Berkshires?”

            “Yep,” he said, unscrewing his water bottle top. “You know it?”

            “Sort of. I used to…this might sound crazy, but I have an energy therapist there.”

            David held on to the water in his mouth, bug-eyed, before swallowing it down. “Really.”

            “Yeah, it’s not as weird as it sounds. It’s because I’m constantly carrying this energy around, or like, tapping into other people’s and—”

            “No, no,” he said, looking at her. “I used to do Reiki. You know. So I know.”

            “Hmm,” she said, impressed. “Really?”

            “Oh yeah,” he nodded. “I used to be this, like… I don’t know. Really spiritual guy.”

            “Spiritual,” she repeated.

            “Yeah,” he said, fiddling with his water bottle cap. “It’s really something, isn’t it. The energy around us. I guess you’d understand. I don’t know if I could do it—Reiki—now. It’s like, people are so fractured. They’re just—everyone is in seventeen different places. Sorry,” he said, taking a startling deep breath.

            “For?” She looked past him up the aisle. There didn’t seem to be any stragglers there, no one coming for their empty seat.

            “For this,” he said, moving his hand in a circle around his head. “I’m just not completely here.”

            “You miss your family?” Sloane asked, trying to make her voice pique in the right place.

            “Well sure, but that’s not it. It’s just,” he exhaled again, looked at her. “I’m going through—fuck it. You know. A mid life crisis.”

            He followed his comment with a laugh, which invited Sloane to laugh also, but his admission made her sad. To be thrust so quickly into someone’s orbit, to feel the weight around them, to know you didn’t have enough time to discern the origin of their hows and whys.

            “It’s not a big deal,” he said, brushing something off his pants. “It really isn’t. It’s just that this is not a great time for me to be on tour. Sorry, whew! And the plane’s not even in the air yet! There’s a couple seats available, you might want to move!”