airplane flush

flying next to the toilets hits different

There is something deeply unserious about sitting in the back of an airplane. In late March I was on the way home from Los Angeles and, because I refuse to pay extra for an experience I already know will be horrible, hadn’t chosen a seat before the flight. I was randomly assigned an aisle seat in the very last row. This, as we know, is right by the rear toilets which are, counterintuitively, right by the galley. A thoroughfare of weak coffee and urine. 

Normally, flying feels like a small miracle: we are lifting off, we are in the air, we are moving from one place to another at a speed faster than I can comprehend. In the last row, flight feels like drudgery. One flight attendant tells a pointless story about visiting his mom in Des Moines. A bathroom line forms, then a voice comes on the intercom to tell those in line to return to their seats. Back here, no one seems remotely conscious of the fact that we could die at any moment. Even when we hit turbulence, which we do, it feels more like an chintzy wooden roller coaster. We’re all stiff in our seats that don’t recline listening to gossip that doesn’t matter and the swish and gurgle of the blunt-force airplane flush. 

Flying from New York to LA for a single weekend was, I have concluded, kind of a dumb idea. I couldn’t adjust to the time change in such a short span. Every evening around 7 — 10 p.m. New York time — I became a zombie. We ate dinner around 8: more zombie. Afterward, my friend Sara and I stayed up talking or reading or watching “Love Island UK” until I was too delirious to function. I am pathologically incapable of sleeping in, and I had a cough, which kept me up several hours each night. My trip passed in a blur of tiredness coupled with the desperate feeling I could not be tired — had to be outside enjoying the LA weather. The main character in William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” describes jet lag as “soul delay”: the body traveling on, leaving the essence of self behind. Seventy-two hours is not enough time for the soul to catch up. 

Traveling makes me emotional because of what it represents: a coming, a leaving, a scattering of different pieces of yourself. After a big breakup a couple of years ago, I cried when I found myself alone in an airport for the first time. Regardless of our emotional mismatch, we’d always done logistics well together; we just had to be the most efficient people in the airport security line, for some reason. Now, my ex wasn’t there to watch our stuff at the gate while I grabbed us food or refilled our water bottles. I was alone again, mentally shredding an entire shared vocabulary, letting go of a superfluous way of moving through the world. Struggling to roll my carry-on into the too-tight bathroom stall. 

I also cry an inordinate amount on airplanes. There is a scientific explanation for this: something about the lower atmospheric pressure leading to heightened emotions. On that flight back from LA, I cried on an airplane to “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” a rom-com from 2003 starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey that falls into the “spunky female journalist” category along with “13 Going on 30” and “The Devil Wears Prada.” It was the sex scene that got me: the moment when, having taken Kate Hudson home to meet his family in Staten Island, having gotten caught in the rain with her on the back of his motorcycle on their way home from a day of flirting on the boardwalk, Matthew McConaughey starts the shower, turns to Kate Hudson, and, after some dialogue, gently peels off her soaked white tank. Part of it was the tank, which looked just like my kids’ size large Fruit of the Looms. Part of it was the peeling, wet, delicate, like skinning a grape. How he could have been amorous or passionate but instead chose to be careful. How she sat on the toilet seat looking up at him, trusting him to expose her.

I don’t trust anyone to expose me. My therapist says that the feeling will come back, that it’s like being sick: after a day or two, you forget how it feels to be well. I have forgotten what it’s like to be Kate Hudson! To flirt, to get rained on, to operate in the reckless optimism required for true intimacy. I bring my umbrella everywhere. I want to observe — to seat all of my exes in the four rows at the back of the plane and watch them bond over feeling crammed in and ridiculous. I no longer remember what it feels like to want to engage. I still want to be loved in an abstract way, but please do not ask me to do anything about it. 

There isn’t a point to this dispatch except to unstick myself a little. I went to my first Dream Baby Press writing club last week, and following a prompt for 10 minutes of frantic legal pad scribbling felt like letting myself cry in the shower after a long, long day. Maybe remembering how it feels to create will help me remember how it feels to want. Maybe it will allow my soul to catch up to my body, hurtling through flattened time. I am so alive, and I could die at any second, and nothing is all that serious, and if I close my eyes I swear I can hear the flush. 

Some recent writing

I spend 90% of my time editing other people’s work, but last month I actually published two pieces of my own. The first, for Business Insider, was an in-depth interview with Miki Agrawal about her life since being accused of sexual harassment by an employee at, and forced to resign from, her period underwear company, Thinx. She told me, among other things, “When everyone’s topless at your company retreat, you’re like, ‘All right.’ I wasn't like, ‘Everyone get topless.’ They just did that because they’re the type of people who do that. And so I was like, ‘OK, have at it.’” OK, have at it.

The second piece was for my friend Delia Cai’s Substack, Deez Links, where she did a special series called “Hate Read.” (You might have heard of it.) Mine is about how Taylor Swift can’t put together an outfit to save her life, and how that is demoralizing. If you like it, check out the whole archive.

Catch a feel

Palestinian Resistance: An Icon for Those Who Live Free by Susan Abulhawa, Lit Hub

Total Eclipse by Annie Dillard, Pioneer Works

The Money Is in All the Wrong Places by Kelsey McKinney, Defector