When I was younger, there was a fantasy I kept revisiting on planes. I’m sitting next to a person, who in earlier iterations of this scene was based on one real man, but whose features have since eroded into anonymity (as I get older I’m shocked by the depth of feeling that can move from one vessel to another -- though I wonder what falls out of my arms in the transfer).
He rests his head on my shoulder, his hair brushing against my neck and my jaw, and I let my own head fall onto his. That alone could have been the entire fantasy. I’d been told that I wasn’t a welcoming place. Exposed bone. Harsh and uncomfortable.
Of course that isn’t true up here. In the air, we settle into place naturally, eyes closed, window shutter drawn. A stewardess walks down the aisle and glances at us –
That was the important part: being seen. I based it on something I heard while waiting to be seated at a restaurant. I’m sitting on a bench by the hosts’ stand, where one of the hostesses returns to report something back to the others. With subdued urgency, she whispers about a pair of people I can’t see: I think they are together. Their hands were touching. Apparently the hosts have been debating this couple’s relationship, and that contact, however small, settles it. Of course they’re together.
I loved that moment. I imagined being the subject of that idle gossip, the benign intrigue. Back then it was remote enough to imagine someone seeing me with another man (who at that point I would have called that other man) and to see the care as obvious, to draw the inevitable conclusion.
I imagine that stewardess meeting her friends in the galley and saying I saw them, their shoulders are touching.
Obvious, heads resting on shoulders. Inevitable, the gravity that pulls them down. Of course, of course, of course.
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