It wouldn't be something he normally would notice, but the dull cramp in his ass after six hours of flight was starting to kick in, and it amplified the distractions. Not to mention his empty stomach. It was rumbling. No, not rumbling, rattling. Like her hands, at the goddamn seatbelt.
He stared at the passengers still boarding, herds in a gauntlet. They seemed to march to her seatbelt cadence: click-clink, click-clink, click-clink, click. She shifted, and he got a whiff of her breath, of her essence, as she did so. It was stale and wilted. Aunt Jo's open-casket funeral service last month. The thought came unbidden to him. The falsely fresh smell of a sanitized body, everything vital that moved it taken out. Only a husk left behind. It was a fitting metaphor for his mother's sister, who'd never married or had any kids, never moved out of her parents house, never travelled. And yet, she was the last of his parents' generation to die. Maybe she'd done something right after all. The irony that he could smell her here on a plane heading to India for reasons he still couldn't quite come to terms with was not lost on him.
"Fucking coach" he mouthed, and went back to reading Men's Health. The telltale sensation of moving while being still acted as an embrace: they were finally taxiing away from the gate. The girl, her breathing had gotten heavier and it audibly came in little pants. A feeble baby's breath sound. He regarded her out of his periphery: maybe she was 30? Dressed like a 20 year old tomboy that didn't know she'd already crested puberty. Lank hair, large round eyes and a tattoo of an anchor in the fleshy juncture of right thumb and index finger. Self aware and not, much like he was of her. He watched, amused as she frantically stood and failed, slingshotted back by the still-connected belt. "At least its done its job, " he smirked to himself. The A321 picked up speed. He savored the lift. Even as he has come to find it commonplace, like filling a kitchen sink or eating a strawberry, he loved how a plane rose in the air. "I'm rising again." he thought, and smiled a bit. And so he rose, but not just in a way that a plane lifts its passengers. He actually felt lighter. No, not just lighter, enlightened. He acknowledged the sensation of a palm on the back of his neck even before he'd fully felt it. His left brain chalked it up to the rapid lift into the atmosphere; his right knew it was purposefully guiding his face back to the girl next to him.
"I am not alone." he suddenly thought, confused at his own mind's wanderings.
"And neither is she." the rejoinder came, equally as unbidden as the first.
He scaled her figure and face with his gaze, and saw she was gripping her ruby lip with two fingers. He rose to meet her gaze for the first time, not at all surprised to see tears there. Sunlight from the late afternoon window struck them just so and it appeared to him like little prisms. "They are so bright for such small things" he thought absentmindedly. "And so clear. Like a little mirror." He realized then he had been gripping the armrests. And he needed to hear her voice, and so his own croaked, coarse from hibernation, "It gets easier after takeoff, don't you think?"
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