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Ready to Go

So that's it. I'm packed and ready to go. Nothing left to do.

Cec is hanging out with friends in Jutland this weekend, and I'm only half here now, so the apartment has a strange, abandoned feeling to it. I found myself saying goodbye to the plants. Not sure I'll be able to sleep tonight, I can feel it.

Some people don't like flying, and I guess I can see why they wouldn't, but I just don't understand that feeling. I love flying, everything about it. The waiting, the nervousness, the rumbling takeoffs and dodgy landings in atrocious weather. I feel so at home up there.

And the way it's been these days, the airplanes are a place of safety. I'm unreachable, no phone or net. Since there's precious little I can do, it removes the need to do anything and I can just relax- really relax. Plug into some music, read a book, or just be still and content. The last few flights across the Atlantic have been too short, and I know the one to Holland tomorrow will certainly be.

One of my co-workers told me about a flight he'd just been on from Singapore back to Copenhagen. He was on British Airways and had been bumped up from business to first class, so he'd gotten one of those pod things that folds out into a little flat-bed capsule. He was trying to fall asleep after the flight attendants had put the lights out in the big 747-400's bubble top. The great thing about the BA pods is they give you almost complete privacy, but he could see into the pod beside him through a slit in the side of the wall. There was a young girl, attractive, asleep, facing him. She had a lost expression on her face and her eyes were REMing in dream. Somewhere outside and below was the Himalayas, but that was just an abstract idea. The two of them could have been anywhere. On a ship to Centauri maybe.

That's what I love- the strange abstractness of the experience. Time to be at peace and to think in the dark. Outside, the thin, frigid, unlivable air is screaming by at more than half the speed of sound, but you and your fellows are safe, more or less, in this little bubble of humanity, with the lullaby of the engines to put you to sleep.

Posted by case at June 26, 2004 11:09 PM