Airplane Story

I woke up suddenly next to one of the most beautiful people I had ever seen.  My neck was sore from the table I rested my head on, and I folded it back into the seat in front of me.  Wiping my face off, I looked up and over at this woman to my left.  I hadn’t processed yet where our flight was over the ocean, or how long we’d been aboard.  Looking at her now I probably couldn’t tell you where the flight was supposed to land.  A book in my lap was open, but to the page I had bookmarked last time I finished reading.  It had apparently put me to sleep.

“Enthralling book…”  Came a voice to my left.

I glanced over at her, smirking inside and denying her dry humor.  ”Yeah it’s…., it’s fascinating” I chuckled and sat up in my seat.  ”Where you headed?” I asked smoothly.

“Well you asked me that when you got on the plane next to me, and everyone here is still heading to the same place.  It should say where we’re going on the plane ticket you bought.”  I felt like an idiot, but I laughed it off.  I must have really been out once I fell asleep.

When we boarded the plane in LA, it was 9:30 at night.  Now the sun was coming up, which is always as spectacular sight from the cabin of an airplane over the ocean.  The sky was pink and yellow, and the sun had started to melt the ice crystals forming on the window a passenger seat and two layers of glass away from me on the outside of the jetliner.  It’s so hard when your life has you all over the world, leaving and arriving places at strange times, with time changes and unreasonable layovers to destroy whatever was left of your internal clock. Under the airplane’s artificial reading lamp that had for the last hour or two lit the back of my head, I caught the end credits on one of those in-flight movies.  I hadn’t paid for the headphone adapter or whatever, because apparently on airplanes it’s free to watch movies, but listening to them costs five dollars.

My foggy brain did hear the beautiful woman beside me cough a few times before regaining her composure and straightening up.  ”So you don’t fly a whole lot.”  I said to her, connecting her eyes with mine for the first time.  I could tell she was new to this by the way she had raced through the magazine in the seat pocket, the way the free peanuts were gone right away, and the way she hadn’t yet figured out how to change the channel on the silent TV in front of her, still scrolling the same credits from the movie I had just woken up to.  Now she was sitting bored and unoccupied, staring at the back of the seat in front of her.

“Yea I’m not big into traveling, buuut apparently you are.  What’s the story?” She said, with that same dryness about her.  Eye contact again, this time she held it.  It could have been her stare or the rising sun that made her hair glow like a halo around her head, but I was dissolved inside as I caught her gaze.  I blinked a few times as my heart turned over.  ”Uh, I produce music here and there for a small record label, they send me all over the place so I can tell bands how to sound like the Top 40 groups.  I like doing it I suppose.  Music is a nice way to spend your time.”  That had come out smoother than I’d expected.  ”What are you traveling for?” I asked.

“My daughter has leukemia, she’s three years old and has about three months.”  Those words hung in the air for a little while. “So I’m going to see her where she lives with her father.” She scoffed to herself.  ”Sorry to bring your mood down to my level”.  I fumbled for words as my churning heart dropped into my feet.

“No it’s fine, jeez, I’m really sorry to hear that.”

“The doctors are trying their best, I know God is faithful.” She smiled and looked out the window, her hair still glowing as the sunlight intersected it on it’s way into my eyes.  What a thing to have on your mind all the time.  I felt awful for her now.  The Heineken can I had emptied into my throat earlier in the flight glared up at me from the seat pocket and challenged my lazy life.

There was a lot she had left out of her story so far.  Why did this kid live with her dad?  Why the divorce?  How was this mom just now going to visit her dying daughter?  I wasn’t about to ask these questions, but I coughed up a small talk way to break the silence she had just created.

“So you’re religious then?”

She heard the skepticism in my voice, but turned around to  entertain me anyway

“Religious is one way to say it I guess.  I follow God wherever he leads me.” she replied.

I’m not religious myself.  I really like music, and I really like people, but I don’t understand God.  If there are people like the woman next to me who “follow him”, why are those the people with helplessly dying children in broken families?  Something in my chest had shifted now.  Somewhere inside I was melting like wax for this woman’s life that I knew nothing about.

“Do you have a faith?” She asked me, trying to perpetuate a conversation on her worry-filled flight.

“Not so much.  I never understood it.” My eyes roamed out the window into the color.

“Can I tell you about mine?” Inhaling deeply I sat up in my chair, her pretty face turned my way.  She wanted to talk to me about her God while her world was falling part in his hand as she “followed” where he was leading her.  Her dryness had faded into a care for me, a random guy on a plane.  Now I could tell she really wanted me to know how great God was.

I listened to her the rest of the flight. She spoke of this peace she had and of this joy that woke her up everyday to hope.  I was full of questions, but before I had the guts to ask, the plane touched down and had taxied to the gate.  I gave her my business card and she wrote her email address on the napkin that came with her coffee on the plane.  She said she would pray for me, and then headed to baggage claim by herself.

Dragging my suitcase through the airport door on a pair of horribly inefficient wheels, the chill of the damp Seattle air hit me square in the face like it always does.  I shivered and pulled a cigarette from my backpack as I reached the curb where I would wait for a taxi.  Fumbling in my pocket for my gas station lighter, I found it next to the napkin with the woman’s email scribbled on it.  I pulled the napkin out of my pocket with the lighter, and unfolded it as I filled my lungs with smoke.  A coffee stain circle crossed through her name on the thin paper, “Erica”.

I stared down the street under the overhang outside the airport, eying the oncoming traffic for a taxi to flag down.  The warm thought of sitting next to her on the plane as the sun lit up the cabin was enough to bring the sun out in the city for just a moment.  In Seattle this is a rare and beautiful sight.  As the grey sky cracked open for a brief second, the same sun lit up the falling rain like it lit  the back of her head, making me irresponsibly happy.  I shivered again and stuffed the napkin in my pocket.

I decided that life in all its pain is still unspeakably brilliant, too brilliant, in fact, to be unorchestrated.