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<\/p>\nAn aluminum vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air–this is what the word plane used to mean to me. I thought about them when one flew above me in the blue summer sky, a tiny greyish shape that inevitably leads anyone with a fertile imagination to indulge in a thousand theories about who the strangers in the sky are, where are they coming from and where they are going, and why it is I will never meet them. I watched as that shape, which seemed almost too tiny for what it really was, flew away from where my eyes could see and told myself a thousand different stories about people I would never know, and then, almost as if that fraction of a minute had never really happened, I forgot. As easily as it went, my mind returns from whichever two-second journey it went on this time, and once again I am home.<\/p>\n
Until, of course, I am not. The very thin line that separates infrequent thoughts from the grand subjects of our lives began to erase itself the moment I sat in seat 32A.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you going home or leaving home, sweetheart?\u201d<\/p>\n
The question had come from the woman in the seat next to mine. She smelled like that strong flowery perfume my grandmother loves to wear and seemed to be part of the peculiar fraction of human beings who have yet to realize that most of us do not want to make pleasant conversation on planes \u2013 but still,\u00a0of course, I smiled at her the most genuine of my smiles, because on this specific day, on this very specific plane ride, it felt, for some strange reason, as if this was the most important question anyone had ever asked me.<\/p>\n
Was I going home or leaving home? I don\u2019t remember what I told her. I don\u2019t remember what movies I watched to fill the achingly long hours that stretched all the way from the warm Rio night to a windy morning in Ohio. I don\u2019t remember if the connecting flight was in Chicago or New York, and I don\u2019t remember the name of that stranger who spent too large a fraction of those eleven hours telling me the most uninteresting tales about how her son was getting married next spring and how desperately her daughter needed a haircut. What I remember is, almost exclusively, the deafening quietness of home fading away.<\/p>\n
I remember it all so vividly, the sound of my little cousins laughing at some movie that ends like every children\u2019s movie, my sister\u2019s distant yell from across the wall about a borrowed pair of pants, and my father\u2019s jokes that with the years became funny simply for the ironic lack of any laughable punchline. The sight of the sun setting behind the grey and green skyline, its repeatedly\u00a0extraordinary beauty framed by my bedroom window. The pictures glued by tape on the wall across my bed, one for each important date, collected since I got my camera wrapped in yellow paper for my fourteenth Christmas. The blurry view of my dog asleep by the foot of the bed. I remember catching the scent of my grandmother\u2019s chocolate brownies, and\u00a0the taste of my father\u2019s homemade pizza \u2013 improving a little with each attempt \u2013 and the soft touch of the wind on my face on those lucky late winter nights when, for once, it was actually cold. It had never been so vivid, so painfully obvious \u2013 and yet, when I closed my eyes as the plane took off and reached for it, all I really grasped was air, empty and cold and with a slight smell of that flowery perfume. I reached for home, but when I looked through the small window of the plane down to the city where I had grown up, it\u00a0had already faded.<\/p>\n
Was I going home or leaving home? I don\u2019t remember what I told her. If another old lady who hadn\u2019t gotten the memo about small talk in\u00a0planes were to ask me again, I would have no choice but to laugh. \u201cBoth,\u201d I simply must reply, and then smile stupidly at my average-level-wit in answering a question for which there is just no answer.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth.\u201d The echo of the word was the sound of the crisp wind on the days that separated the Ohio fall from my first real winter; it was my best friend\u2019s laugh and his voice telling me the\u00a0same stories over and over again through the phone; it was the desperate typing on my keyboard, the silly sound of proudly and unapologetically calling myself a writer; it was the soft melody of songs I have never heard before, the unknown sound of my own accent to my ears, and the silent void where one day would be the names of people I had yet to meet. The echo of both was the unrecognizable quietness of a life that has yet to be.<\/p>\n
This is what the word plane used to mean: a vehicle almost always made of aluminum \u2013 due to it being a metal both strong and lightweight \u2013 that is able to fly by gaining support from the air. I thought about them casually and unpretentiously, only once in a while and not even a little more than that. And then, of course, the plane became everything. Those twelve long hours when I am forced to sit next to a stranger I will never see again and remember I am claustrophobic became the single thing that connects one half of my life to the other, the thing that makes them one. They take me from the beginning of spring to the end of summer, and draw a thin line between past and future, almost invisible from anywhere except when sitting at 32A, staring down through the window at whatever it is home means.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"