Somewhere between Atlanta and Seoul I lost half a day.

I think it slipped out into the great infinity of sky– time leaking into the clouds, an hour here, an hour there,

The minutes dripping down like condensation pooling together onto the cumulonimbus floor of the sky, the seconds wisping into cloud dust.

I know they’ve tried to tell me many times how time works on international flights, but my mind cannot understand.

Perhaps the hours and the minutes and the seconds all find each other again, like a diaspora coming home, and quietly rain back down on my life later.

Or maybe those twelve hours are stored up somewhere in one of God’s bathroom cabinets behind where He keeps the vitamins in the same place he puts the tears that watered those lost minutes,

Lost minutes that ached of goodbyes, and pain that my hands cannot touch or heal no matter how much I long to span them around all the problems, and heal the hunger of hurting souls and the seduction of spiderwebbed thoughts.

Perhaps he mixes the lost minutes with the tears where they crystalize into jewels in the bottle marked with my name in the bathroom cabinet of God’s house where they wait for sometime when they are redeemed and I dare to clasp my hands around them and learn they were never really lost.

Perhaps so.