Random Realizations While Roaming

A daily log for a few days

1. When you sit next to a perfect—often less than perfect—stranger on a plane for hours and hours. Maybe you talk, maybe you don’t—or just a bit with whatever language you have available between you. You’re sardine-packed, along with a few hundred others just like you, into a steel rocket that hurls you through space at five hundred plus miles per hour. Ok, maybe not space yet but the closest most of us will get to it. You’re squeezed in close—closer than you’d ever naturally sit place next to a stranger, say if you were on a long stretch of beach. And if that stranger is large, say a 250-300 pounder, which would describe my most recent row mate, then even closer. Edges of him spilling out onto my edges. So much for social distancing. I am feeling vulnerable. We all are. That’s one of the prerequisites to placing our lives in the hands of a possibly alcoholic pilot and settling into the at-best full sized bed seat you are sharing with a stranger, hoping he doesn’t fart or if he does that you won’t smell it. The other prerequisite being your unwillingness to walk to wherever you’re headed.

   Doll-sized trays of crappy food are carted away, the lights go out and people start to doze off to the roar of the jets fighting against gravity to keep us lifted and forward thrusted. Limbs loosen over seats and soon carefully respected millimeters of separation are hijacked by the wherever however whims of fitful sleep. Mouths slacken. Paunches paunch. We all bear witness to our sleep mate and they to us. In this case, people whose names we may never come to know or know how to pronounce if we do.

   At first you move to accommodate the violation of space. But you can only press yourself so far into the steel wall before you are forced to succumb. To the noise, to the dark, to the warmth from the stranger sinking through your flight-issued blanket, your clothes. Traveling in fully-booked economy class is as close as I ever get to picking up a strange in a bar and having him spend the night. We toss and turn, some body part inevitably in contact. We are vulnerable. We succumb to the breath, the possible fart. Together, in the dark.

   And then the lights come on again, we pull ourselves back together, the wheels descend below us and we collect our things overhead and head out the door. Still strangers. And yet.