The+Way+In+Between

My weight drops and my seatbelt presses into the button on my pants, turbulence on the generic-class flight. The confused spiraling of my stomach used to make me remember what many people have said to me: life is short. Only now I realize, everyone says it, but no one means it. We all know that life is long. As we advance, it grows longer and longer. What we remember is short. Of life, we live every moment, and yet so much we let pass by, simply beneath our nose, ignored smells and sounds, things mundane. Forgotten moments of our lives take up the space in our brains that we do not use, abandoned thoughts echoing between our skulls and our cerebrum, hollow and heavy with what we've consciously or subconsciously decided did not matter enough to clog our memory.

Airplanes are flying sinkholes of the mundane. Peroxide blondes and hairsprayed brunettes in dark blues and regal purples, tired eyes and bleach-white smiles, black pantyhose and the same pair of black patent-leather heels seven times over between them, they are variations on a theme. We forget them, like we forget the person sitting next to us as he asked for the time, like we forget the crappy movie we saw, the itch of the cheap pillow cover against our neck, the lack of space between our kneecaps and our tray tables, like we forget the soft ding that rings through the cabin as the seatbelt sign goes off.

It's the same every flight. You board, you're bored, you sit down and watch the same instructional video the airline's been using since 1970, the one where they mention CD players like people still use them, where cell phones look big enough to house a small family of lemmings. If you've flown before, everything is familiar and feels like a bad mad lib without the enjoyment of nonsense words.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is _____, and I'll be your captain for today. I'd like to welcome you on our flight to _____. We'll be taking off soon, so flight attendants, please find your seats. Have a pleasant trip, and thank you for flying with ____.

It's a movie with bad actors working the aisles, too happy. You've seen the movie too many times before, long enough ago that it's a blur, but recently enough that everything is boringly familiar. Row names, row numbers, window shades, buttons on armrests. Plastic trays, plastic utensils, plastic wrappings, plastic-tasting food, plastic-looking people who serve it to you.

Before and after the feature film, you stare at the screen saying you've got this many hours to your destination and what the time is there, and that you're flying at 530 or so mph, about 34,000 feet above the ground. The amazing thing is, no one panics. No one takes a look at the screen and runs screaming down the aisle and through the push-to-open-slide-to-lock doors of the too-small-smoke-monitored lavatory; despite the fact that they're sitting in a pressure-controlled, turbine-propelled, god-knows-how-many-tons piece of metal 34,000 feet in the air, and no one looks at that and thinks, gee, I could die on this big hunk of metal. What they think is, gee, 530 miles per hour is pretty fast. They think that, and then they realize it's still going to take them 8 hours to get to wherever they're going.

Eight hours seems like a long time, but I do the quick math, actually using some of what they taught me in high school. Rate times time equals distance. If you travel at 530 mph for 8 hours, you've gone 4240 miles. That's a lot. The world, from the view of the airplane window, with all the little crystallized water bits around that weird little hole or dent or whatever the hell it is on the second layer of glass, becomes very big and very small at the same time. Clouds carpet the air beneath you, and everything seems solid. But it's not.

It is uncomfortable, it is unstable, it is like another world. It is the story of the spaces in between, the part of your trip that you neglect to take photos of, and yet you know that those airplanes you took hold within them a thousand different stories, abandoned in the backs of a thousand different minds.