Whenever I travel, amid strangers, cramped aisles, and stale air, I find home 30,000 feet up in a metal tube rocketing off to who-knows-where. No matter the airplane or airline, the setting is always the same: drab, dark blue seats with crumb-filled seat pockets and worn carpet. Even the crew doesn’t change; the flight attendants are bubbly as ever, the pilot cracks the same tired jokes. It never changes, and there is something wonderful in that. After pinballing between different cities—or even countries or continents— the interior of an airplane becomes a welcome constant. The laws of luggage storage and in-flight entertainment replace the rules of time and geography up here. I may never know what the sun will be doing when the pilot claims…show more content… We can be whoever we want when our names are "46A" and "17G". We can be secret millionaires headed off to just one of the many perfect vacations of our perfect lives. Instead we choose to be too honest, to spill our secrets because we know that we will never see 46A again. Soon we’ve moved past reasons for our trip and onto discussing our personal lives. All concepts of privacy are abandoned when someone’s elbow juts into your side, and your knee encroaches upon their sacred personal space. Even I, someone who is loath to speaking about even a single aspect of her life, find myself spinning together an autobiography for a person I’ve never met. Suppressed hopes and dreams tumble out as we give life to ideas that only existed in our heads, trying them out in front of people we hope we will never see again. Strangers replace the best friends and confidantes in our…show more content… On one particular eight hour flight, I find myself seated in the middle of the middle row, far away from a window and cut off from the aisle. The person to my right, a wild-eyed, frazzled woman, suffers the same predicament, and we exchange sympathetic looks as we sit down. She takes care to preserve my bubble of personal space, and I return the favor. The cheerful man who sits next to me offers me his pillow, and I shake my head, so instead, all three of us pass our miniature, pink stuffed pillows down to the woman at the end of the row whose joints creak. Wordlessly, the four of us organize a complex system of life aboard the plane, one in which bathroom breaks are timed not to disrupt the sleeping aisle-seaters and people in the middle are given adequate space. We swap meal items like schoolchildren at lunchtime and procure pens for the woman who has an affinity for Sudoku. When the flight attendant stalks down the aisle, demanding our nationalities so as to give us the correct form needed to enter the country, we freeze. It is only after we’ve scribbled in answers on the forms and stuffed them out of sight that we settle back into our harmony again. There is no place for pointless geographical divisions when you’re 30,000 feet above the
