Fixed point

When I was a child, aeroplanes in high flight at night-time held a special fascination for me. I did not fancy the ones which were so close to the ground that their windows could be counted or the name of the airline read off their sides by the light at their wingtips; I liked the ones which were so high up that they were nameless fireflies on the night sky, chance visitors in my backyard patch of stars, their ports of call obscure to all except those who sat within. How I wished to be one of them, flying so far away that I could leave myself behind; observe, as I flew over my city, the cross-hatched patterns of my own life shimmering below, my past, waving to me from some high terrace. Now that I am older, instead, my mind drifts into the future, with all the journeys that lie before me, some that I will undertake on my own, some accompanied; some of my own creation and some undertaken by force of circumstance. Each time I think these thoughts, I wish that all of them would end in a homecoming. I pray that there would always be in my life, at all times, a place I call home; a sort of physical equivalent of a mathematical fixed point.