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Christopher Cross's Sailing is playing through my AirPods, and the air smells faintly of pasta, the way a cabin does when someone a few rows up has opened their meal. In a metal tube in the sky, smells linger and fade slow. The song takes me back to my youth. I wear the eighties like a badge, I always have.

As the plane settles into cruising altitude, it comes to me, quietly, why Guam is a place I don't really want to be going. My father left us two months ago, and the island holds all of it now. Him. Everything about him. It isn't that I don't want to remember the good, I do. It's something I can't quite name. Maybe I'm just waiting for the sting to soften, and it hasn't yet.

More often than not, this is where my mind goes when there's nothing to stop it. Not just the usual things, my kids, my wife, the future, but my father. What he left behind. What he hoped would happen. The things he promised, the things he spoke to me about, and what has actually materialized since. They aren't always the same thing, and I'm still working out what to do with that.

I don't ever want to come off as a spoiled brat. I've lived a good and comfortable life, built on the hard work and sacrifice of my parents, and I know it. But it's also true that we worked. My sisters and I worked right alongside them. School let out and we went straight to the bakery, did whatever needed doing, whatever the day called for. That was the arrangement, and no one asked us whether we liked it.

It makes me think of the old farming families, the ones with all those kids. Part of it, I'm sure, was that the farm needed hands. I can smile about it now, the comparison, but it wasn't so different. We were the hands. Every one of us contributed something.

My childhood isn't a reel of play and games. We played at school, sure, like any other kid. But when school was out, it was work, me in production, my sisters at their own posts. That's the childhood I have. And I disliked it then, of course I did. What child wouldn't rather be playing than working? But now, at fifty-nine, I'm not so sure it was the bad thing it felt like at the time. Maybe it gave me something. Maybe it cost me something too. Maybe both are true and I just haven't finished sorting which is which.

That's the thing I keep bumping into up here. I don't have it resolved. I can't tie it off with a clean bow and tell you what it all meant, my father, the work, the promises kept and the ones that drifted, the gratitude and the ache that somehow live in the same chest at the same time. I thought by now I might. But two months is not very long, and I'm thirty thousand feet over the Pacific, heading back to the one place that holds every bit of it.

So I'm not going to pretend I've landed somewhere I haven't. Sailing is still playing. The island is still out there ahead of me, under the clouds. And I'm still here in the in-between, going back to him, not quite ready, still turning it all over.

Maybe that’s why this one doesn’t have a title yet. Maybe my life is, too. Yet to be titled.