Memories of Flight is a deeply personal collection that I began as a creative outlet. Inspired by the many trips of my childhood, almost always to visit relatives, I had ample time for my favorite activity: reading. For hours on end, I would leave the hectic and chaotic world behind to chase faraway and fictional worlds, different from my own and always better. The words on the page offered a brief respite from a world I could not fully comprehend but desperately wanted to escape. As I grew through my teenage years and into adulthood, I found myself retreating from those places of comfort, choosing other means to satisfy my needs instead. It was only later that I found my way back to the written word; and when I did, something had shifted. Writing was no longer a means of escape; it had become a means of expression.
I have included this collection here because I have never been able to keep the two worlds fully apart. History, at its core, is a discipline obsessed with the lives of people; with where they came from, what they survived, and what they left behind. I came to that obsession honestly. The same restlessness that carried me from the pastures of central Texas to the beaches of Guam, from the flight deck to the archive, lives somewhere in these pages too. My research into colonialism, empire, race, and the people who resisted and endured all three did not begin in a library; it began in the accumulation of a life spent moving through the world, watching it, and trying to make sense of it. These stories and poems are pieces of that. They are offered here not as footnotes to the academic work, but as the soil it grew from.
Thank you so much for being here. These pages have been waiting a long time to be seen, and it is a quiet, strange, and wonderful thing to finally set them down somewhere and let them breathe. I hope that in reading them, you find something that resonates – a feeling, a memory, a moment of recognition. I have carried these stories for a long time. It means more than you know to share them.
bryton.
Bryton Chain 