On flying

Onn a flight earlier this month

I’m on a plane, and after a long time, I have two seats to myself. After a long time, I don’t feel anxious, the kind of post-pandemic anxiety and general life stress that for me, made flying a more clutched hands situation than anything else. I am listening to music, and watching the second season of a television show I haven’t had time to see, and it’s always 5 pm somewhere, and its always day time, somewhere in the clouds. I used to love flying — suddenly, I was somewhere, enclosed, no one knew where I was, or who I was, and I was unreachable. Suddenly, as the song goes, all my worries felt so far away, I felt so removed from everything. Somehow, today, I am reminded of a late night flight a long time ago — probably 11 years ago to be exact! The horror! — where I had three seats to myself and felt comforted by the thought of stretching out, and not thinking about anything for the next few days, no work, no career, nothing but the comfortable thoughts of a holiday. But it always kept creeping back. Someone would send a text that would jolt you back to a world of bills and responsibilities and the gnawing feeling that your holiday had somehow decimated your career. That never happened though — slowly, as I realized that the news would always be cyclical and predictable, it no longer mattered because there would always be another story on the carousel, and I’d always be writing. I don’t think about that anymore. I’ll always write, even if it doesn’t look what seems conventional, even if I write for my blog like it’s 2005. Sometimes even I surprise myself by how freeing it was to constantly write about your personal life online, but also of a time in which not everyone was perpetually online, so you could continue writing, in this undiscovered part of the internet, in which you were your real self online, and in which you could share your life without it defining every decision you made next, without it impacting every interaction.