We’ve taken our seats at the back of the plane to LAX. The very back. The seats that don’t lean back, but lean slightly forward with the back wall of the plane. Ah well, c’est la vie. This is an adventure. You take what life throws at you even if it tosses shoddy seats.
The positive side of sitting in the back is that you’re positioned next to the stewardess. We have a particularly chatty one, from Georgia. She takes her job seriously and memorizes what she has to say (which is a lot if you have eight layovers). This makes her before flight speeches personable, opposed to ones that are read straight from the book. She also has an awesome catch phrase that she ends with: “It’s time to fly!” My mom and I like that, and since she’s right next to us we talk her up. Then she talks us up. She’s on a four day stretch that will eventually take her to Vancouver.
I get really excited. “Do you like to travel all over the place?” I ask. “Is it fun?”, “What’s Vancouver like?”
She likes the travel bit. Seeing new places. But...
You’d think Canadians would be laid-back, but they aren’t. She does not enjoy layovers at Vancouver Airport.
Her favorite place so far, out of all of them, every state in the U.S. with the exception of ten, and a few foreign countries, is Bismark, North Dakota. Another surprise. But it must be beautiful in a quite sort of way. She looks like she could appreciate quiet beauty. I don’t know how she’d enjoy a state with a population of only 627,591, though. She likes to talk. I bet when you’re traveling a lot it’s difficult to make solid friends who you can chat with whenever you need to. A myriad of nice strangers on a plane, chained to their seats until the “unbuckle sign” flicks on, 34,000 feet in the air, must be rather convenient.
She seems sort of sad, for that, her loss of connection, and how she’ll suddenly refer to a random hotel as “home”. Snap, I think. What if I become that person? Totally detached, flying everyday, but never really touching down. Up in the air, unreachable?
And then the plane, which has steadily been approaching warp speed, or light speed, whatever, guns its engine and she’s drowned out by a loud mechanical grating noise. Another minus for those back seats. I’m next the window, so I can barely hear my mom and the stewardess’s conversation.
But that’s momentarily okay because my favorite part of the whole plane ride is the lift off. Right when the wheels leave the safety of the runway and a jolt crosses over your body, bottom up, and you notice, as you lift up from your seat slightly, awkwardly, (if you wore your belt too loose, like me) that you are, in fact, defying gravity. That all the pressure of the planet can not get you down. It’s just a second of that feeling, where you lay in limbo between ground and sky, when it really hits you. Then the plane gains it’s ground, or, err, air, and the whole thing seems effortless, really, and your brain span turns to something else, more immediate, and less mind boggling, like full bladders.
I don’t know. Maybe its all the ginger ale I drink during a flight, but something about flying always makes me have to pee. It’s really inconvenient.
And I’ve begun to realize, that’s what I feel like all the time. No. Not like I have to pee constantly. I feel like I am in limbo. Like the plane was, before things got all effortless and smooth, right when your stomach feels lodged between your ribs, where your lungs should be, and you have trouble breathing. Between ground and sky, earth and un-earthly nothingness, not air quite yet, nor clouds, but whatever you have to pass through to get to air and clouds. Between the reality and the surreal.
Surreality. That is where I am. It’s not a destination, but the way to, the foot forward (when you don’t really know where you are putting your foot, but you hope that it’s somewhere nice; soft, and solid, preferably).
Surreality is now my stasis. What I feel when I wear a glamorous fur cape with just about nothing underneath, walking, blinded by bright strobe-y lights, in six-inch silver heels, down a runway, with strangers sitting so close to my path that they are shadows I am afraid I’ll trip on, living so much in the moment that I almost forget to breathe, focusing on looking fierce. All the while knowing that, in the scheme of things, this is quite normal, even basic.
As we begin to straighten, as the plane sorts itself out, as I realize that I might not see home for a while, not long (in the scheme of things) but longer away than I’ve ever experienced and farther away than I’ve ever been, as I look to see Sacramento below me, but see only clouds, I wish for a fleeting moment that I wasn’t doing what I am doing.
But only for a second. This is an adventure. And this adventure will probably throw us more than shoddy seats.
My brain span turns to something less mind boggling.
When the flight from LAX to Mexico City touches down, (something far less gratifying and far more jolting than lifting off) we catch each other’s eyes.
It’s as if we’re both thinking at the same time,
“It’s time to fly.”
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