Strangers on Planes

I met a boy coming down the breezeway of my plane, I caught him smuggling his lip balm in his backpack. I guess we didn’t actually meet, I was just horrified that he had lip balm, and unfortunately not horrified for the right reasons (like national security and threat to the lives of many). Admittedly, all self centered, how dare he have lip balm when I had painstakingly separated myself from mine that same morning? Why did I not think to forgo rules and regulation for the sake of my lips and not spend half the flight gnawing on my dry bottom lip as I pored over a complete book of fluff and sex by Jackie Collins. It was just not fair and truth be known I never actually met him (the boy), because somewhere through the causal banter one has with strange people alighting from planes I was still amazingly pre occupied with that little ball of wax he had and I didn’t.

How does it work when you’re walking down a narrow pathway and have conversational blah blah blahs and then you’re done and you’re still stuck walking next to each other. That awkward silence of thinking maybe you should say more, but what is there to say? Then you don’t want to walk too quickly because it seems you’re running away and might offend them (but who cares, it’s a stranger on a plane?), but if you lag behind you seem rather stupid (again, see previous blurb)… what is it with exchanging words that all of a sudden changes the air around you. Have you ever noticed that cars never drive exactly in tandem with one another, we’re always inching a little bit ahead or behind? We’re scared of making contact, because once you invade that space, how do you get out? You’re stuck on the breezeway and the end seems interminable, like steps to the guillotine and what a relief as you get out and immediately pretend to be busy so you can escape.

After escaping, in the best possible way, not from the boy, but from the annoying to talk or not to talk dilemma, I eventually made it to food. The thing about America is they don’t realize how much they eat. I tend to forget this till I get in line at your standard fast food burrito place and realize the burrito they’re rolling is about the size of my head and probably just as full. The other thing America cannot understand is waste, it was inconceivable that I would be willing to pay for an entire burrito and only request half- sacrilege! Really I would just throw it away so why not give it to someone that had the potential of eating a head? So I request my half a head, much to the sales attendant’s amusement, and from behind me a voice requests the other half of my head (at this juncture I could make a lewd comment about head but will refrain). So now, yet again it’s the boy with the lip balm, here we are sharing space again, how close does sharing a burrito make you?

You can’t really share a burrito and not interact, so as we wait for our burrito we jockey about for position and the right tone and end up having a meal together. I wavered on the sit down together but decided in the end it was polite, he looked like your nice boy from next door (your standard psycho killer), we were sharing and if we had nothing to talk about I could always escape to my plane and never deal with it again. First off, I decide, for me, that this needs to stay non-engaging and relatively removed. Of course, when I decide things like this it is almost always usurped by the fact that we have too much in common to not connect and have a good conversation (sigh). We’re both from Vancouver. We’re both in Dallas. We both are headed to Miami and then we’re both going to the Caribbean AND we’re both working on luxury villas in the Caribbean. What a game fate likes to play sometime, I swear they’re pushing the pieces up there, down there, wherever! I could toss in the fact that we both carry lip balm, like burritos too fill in the cracks.

OK, OK, it was nice to actually talk to someone, I usually spend most plane rides hidden behind my headsets and a few magazines (usually the Economist (has anything happened in Africa?), Oprah (find my inner woman) and Cosmopolitan (the next 50 ways to orgasm) but this trip Jackie Collins wormed her way in, perhaps this was the start of it all, I looked shallow? What does reading a Jackie Collin’s book connote? To me, dumb, airhead, embarrassing and lame. Perfect, just the image I want to put out, a woman that needs to vicariously live life through women named Birdy and Lucky who have wild sex with Russian mobsters) so I don’t need to speak with anyone. Nothing worse than talking to the person next to you and feeling beholden to then carry a conversation the whole flight. Plus men always feel the need to talk to the single female traveling alone, like we need some petting, a bowl of water and a history of their successes?

So LB and I have a great conversation about building in the Caribbean and his plans were fascinating, and so were the differences between the two islands, and a few other points that I have now forgotten but were entertaining at the time, and then we had to catch a plane. I might note that neither of us are that great at keeping or tracking time as we near missed not only the flight but the gate.

So the dilemma, do we sit together on the next flight? 2 hours is a loooooooooong time if you run out of vivacious chatter 30 minutes into a flight. So while he’s asking me this (whether we should sit together) I am furiously calculating in my mind if I truly had the fortitude to do so, does it mean I’m interested in more than a friendly way (I hope not, that would put me in the Jackie Collins category) because it was not my intent to pick up wayward Canadians in airports, then what if we did talk for 2 hours and I came off as so (that would be even worse), so maybe circumvent this all by not sitting together, but then I’d never know what the end of our conversation would be, as it had been pretty good rapport so far and he did seem like a decent guy. 3 seconds wasn’t a lot of time to properly address all of this, including pondering whether this was an elaborate pick up line (how do I know he didn’t follow me to the burrito stand? Was I being gullible?) while standing at the counter with both him and the service agent looking at me expectantly. I capitulated, how was I to resist interesting, entertaining Canadian and (damn me) cute.