An Open Letter to Hangar No. 13

Author’s Note: This letter is a tribute to my grandfather and our time spent building planes in Hangar No. 13. After his passing from cancer, I couldn’t bring myself to return, but when I finally did, the hangar helped me breathe again. It has been a place of healing, where memories and grief could coexist, allowing me to reconnect with both him and myself. This letter is my way of thanking it for giving me the space to remember and to heal.

Dear Hangar No. 13,

You used to breathe like something alive, if you recall.
Not in the way that buildings creak and settle, but in the way the chest expands before speaking. A ribcage, you were, of corrugated steel and reverence. And inside of you were real, working lungs. Lungs that pulled in prairie wind and sawdust which swept through your proud open doors and hushed out the hum of the propellers and warmth from the pilot seat he used to sit in (courtesy of his chronic IBS).
Those funny little two-seater planes he built made him think he could just…fly right out of you and carry himself away with all your air in his lungs. He was full of you and you were full of him. He built those planes not because he knew how flight worked but because he believed in flight. He believed in you. Or, rather, the power of you and the freedom you offered. Faith in motion, he’d say.
When he stopped breathing, so too, did you. You sealed off your lungs as though the right to inhale died with him. And instead you filled yourself with the kind of dust that settles to stay. Thick, patient, watchful dust that cloaked the wings of the planes and settled in the rafters. You just let it hang there.
And I’m sorry for leaving you alone.
I told myself I couldn’t bear to see you like that—hollow, quiet, empty of laughter and stubborn radio static and the sharp sound of socket wrenches biting down. But maybe the truth is I couldn’t face the version of me that still existed in your bones. The girl in lopsided pigtails who sat on the concrete floor cross-legged, passing him tools with greasy fingers. The one who knew how to read the look in his eyes when something wasn’t quite balanced in the engine, or when he was holding back tears because those birds could finally fly.
He was my life and I was his. We were our stories.
But time flew anyway and took you with it. We both felt it. We both sagged under the weight of missing him.
And it wasn’t until I showed up with that broom that the ghosts in the corners flared themselves and began to dance.
Maybe that’s what caught me off guard—the way we startled each other back into breath. I hadn’t expected the rush of stagnant spirit to flood me so suddenly, like a wave breaking over the edge of a dam.
And suddenly everything inside you seemed to breathe with me—like it had been waiting, just as I had, for the moment when we could begin again. You breathed me open. You gave me back the space to feel what it meant to breathe again. To feel it in my whole body, not just in the small, tight way I had been moving through the world for so long. You didn’t change me—not yet—but rather you started to. You started to remind me that I still knew how to live inside my own skin, how to fill my chest with life in the way the sky fills a plane’s wings. How to expand and stretch into the air.
We’re built for flight, you and I. And the ghosts of our past are getting hungry for their mini-pretzels and peanuts.

Yours,