I like to fly

I like to fly. I can’t remember if it’s always been this way, but the memories I have from childhood are pretty good. Sleeping down on the floor of the bulkhead, down by my parents feet. Magic marker books where secrets appear under the ink of a special pen. Trick peanut brittle, filled with spring snakes at our layover in Puerto Rico.

Then in school, flying on my own, back and forth between Los Angeles and New York. Taking the redeye on my way back home, alone in the dark I’d stay up all night. It was a time to reflect on my new life building out west, and prepare for a return to place of my childhood. Prepare for again sleeping under my parents’ roof. I want to make some joke about manifest destiny in reverse. The return flight back to LA was less interesting. Timezones shrink the trip to half its size. Downhill versus uphill.

But this is something different. A cross-country jaunt and a fourteen hour flight compare about the same as do your daily commute and route 66 from end to end. Nothing comes as close as this to opening my eyes to the true nature of the world. Maybe low orbit would be better, but until then this is all I got. As we race towards the sunrise, then straight through to sunset, like a mad dash through hard rain trying not to get wet, I take in enough to see it for the sphere it is. I see the continents roll beneath me and imagine the planet’s spin; imagine our airborn fight against it; imagine the whole deal hurtling through space around that sun doing something similar. Yeah. I like to fly.

I watched Gandhi on the plane (along with about ten other hours of quality, on-demand programming). It should be good preparation for my travels, but I suspect it’s a bit more broad than that. Very little of it has to do with Indian culture. If anything, it makes a statement on how change can only come from those not too tightly bound to the past. Bound just enough to fit in, but not so much as to get stuck. This week’s New Yorker tells a similar story about some new Muslim mayor-type in Amsterdam embracing the gay community. Leading pride parades, going against the cultural norms of his people. I think Gandhi would have been all up in that action too. But the film still sets a nice tone, and paves a nice path for my trip. Flying into the country at six hundred miles an hour, witnessing its modern history in a few blinks of an eye.

I’ll try to stay awake through the rest of the flight, but I don’t think I’ll make it. I feel my dreams stalking me from two rows back. Darkness creeping out from the overhead bins. But it’s okay. A few hours of awkward sleep shouldn’t disrupt my schedule too much. I’ll get to the hotel exhausted, with a full day gone since I left the US. I’ll get to the hotel in a daze and wake up fresh in a new world.