Dear diary, live from Seat 22D, Boeing 737, for you. Delayed flight. Of course it's fucking delayed. I am going to Spain, hola amigos!
I am having something like a panic attack or a layered massive stroke of pure assholeness. If assholeness is not a word, then please Oxford dictionary people, consider including it! It does sound good, right? Oh dear lord, my brain is malfunctioning in spectacular fashion, each neuron firing off complaints in languages I didn't know I spoke. It’s been an hour waiting on the tarmac, but now we're taking off, well, they are taking off, I am just carried and I can't breathe. Why can't I breathe? The air tastes recycled, pre-chewed by three hundred strangers and their collective disappointment. Has everyone brushed their teeth this morning? I seriously doubt it. Stress is eating my chest from the inside, gnawing through ribs like a carnivorous parasite. Like Alien's chest-busters. I have beautiful ribs though, it would be such a shame tearing my chest apart.
My mind is going where it absolutely should not go, spiralling into territories that would make psychiatrists rich and happy. Dear diary, this is the chronicle of my descent into hell… and back.
It all begins with a baby, just a few seats behind me, crying desperately. A classic right?. But the sound pierces through my skull like dental equipment operated by sadists. The cabin pressure is probably causing pain in its inner ears, those tiny canals designed by evolution but torture-tested by Boeing. Is it a boy or a girl? I can't tell from this distance, and frankly the gender becomes irrelevant when it's broadcasting distress at frequencies that make dogs whimper. Their mother should be reassuring them, stroking tiny heads, whispering lies about everything being fine. If I had boobs, I would fill the baby mouth with both of them, why not? Aren't boobs reassuring? But what is she doing? She's staring at her phone screen with the glazed expression of someone who's mentally checked out of parenthood. Her thumbs move across the glass in the universal rhythm of whatever in airplane-mode is possible scrolling, each swipe another second of ignoring her offspring's existential crisis and making my little earbones vibrate like a dildo. My mother became deaf with screaming babies. She was a kindergarden teacher, but I digress. Mommy I love you... And I will always scream it to you!
I look outside the tiny scratched plexiglass window, looking for an angel. The airplane right wing is flapping, a lot. Not just gentle flexing, but actual mechanical spasms that defy everything I learned in physics class. What if it breaks and flies back into the cabin? The metal would slice through the cabin like butter, creating the most brutally efficient way to lose your head since the French got creative with guillotines during their revolutionary period. Clean decapitation, no mess, just heads rolling down the aisle like bowling balls in a macabre strike. Like Robespierre... Oh the guy first name was Maximilien right? Okay. game on bitches!
Look outside again. Fields of god spread below us, geometric patches of white and blue that look like a divine quilt stitched by celestial hands. Beautiful clouds illuminated by the sun drift past like cotton balls soaked in honey light, each one casting shadows on the earth that race across farmland like dark spirits fleeing parad... Motherfuck! Someone farted. The cabin air, already questionable, now carries the aromatic signature of someone's digestive rebellion. I'm breathing from someone else's intestines, their breakfast choices now part of my respiratory system. I am their breakfast sommelier. Trying to guess what they had for breakfast seems a little presumptuous, but my nose insists on forensic analysis. Must be something expired anyway, judging by the biological warfare now circulating through the ventilation system. Eggs that died weeks ago, perhaps. By the way, I am eggs intolerant. Sin uevos, por favor! Bitte ohne Eier! Dairy products that achieved sentience before succumbing to bacterial revolution. My deranged brain starts translating this olfactory assault into food imagery, because apparently I'm a masochist with culinary instincts. Blue cheese. That's what this smells like, but not the good kind, not the creamy gorgonzola that melts perfectly over pizza dough, bubbling under the grill until it turns golden and magnificent. Not the kind that pairs with spicy salami, those beautiful rounds of cured meat that curl at the edges when heated, releasing oils that make your fingers glisten with delicious grease. No, this is blue cheese that's been left to rot in someone's digestive tract, fermented with stomach acid and despair. I can almost taste the pizza I'm craving: thin crust, perfectly charred on the edges, the blue cheese creating rivers of molten perfection between islands of fiery salami that burns your tongue in the most exquisite way, eating it on an Italian restaurant, mediterranean coast, oh god, the beauty. But then another wave of human gas hits me and destroys the entire fantasy, bringing me back to the cabin and brutally reminding that I'm trapped in this flying coffin breathing other people's intestinal poetry.
I know who it was! I think, 22C. It's the guy on the other side, my opposite neighbour in this flying circus, is so spectacularly ugly I want to beat him with something heavy and satisfying. Dude, your haircut is an affront to scissors everywhere, a tragedy of follicular mismanagement that suggests your barber was either legally blind or criminally insane. You suck man, you suck! Your double chin has developed its own gravitational field, and it makes me want to wrap my hands around your throat just to see if there's an actual neck hiding beneath that cascade of flesh. Why did you buy those headphones? No brand, no quality, Chinese build that probably cost less than a cup of coffee and sounds like music played through a tin can filled with angry wasps. However, everything is built in China anyway, so what's the fucking difference.
Woman sleeping in 21F. Decently looking, I suppose, if you enjoy the aesthetic of sun damage and questionable life choices. Her mouth is open, creating a perfect oval that triggers thoughts I absolutely should not be having. No. Stop thinking. Look away from that mouth. Too late. My brain has already calculated angles and possibilities. How would it be if I stuck something there? Maybe she'd like it, maybe she'd bite it clean off. Look away, you piece of shit. This is probably someone's mother, someone's daughter, someone who doesn't deserve to be mentally violated by a stranger at thirty thousand feet. But why is she wearing an almost nonexistent top? The back is completely bare, revealing skin that's wrinkled by too many hours spent worshipping the sun god, leather-like texture that speaks of beach holidays and poor sunscreen application. Yes, definitely one-night stand material. Look away, you sick animal.
We're packed like sardines into this tiny metal can, but still alive, or at least most of us are pretending to be. The guy, 22C, I'm staring at with barely contained violence is already spiritually dead, just hasn't received the official notification yet. The other dude, 21C, so magnificently fat that the flight attendant had to provide a supplemental belt extension, will probably expire before we reach cruising altitude anyway. His breathing sounds like machinery in desperate need of lubrication. Who am I to judge? Maybe he suffers from a rare condition that compels him to inhale cookies and chug soda like it’s oxygen. Tragic, really.
The flight attendant glides past with professional smile number seven from her training manual. For once, at least with two of them, I dream an entire life mating: children with her eyes, dogs running through suburban gardens, weekend trips to garden centres, domestic bliss that tastes like Sunday morning coffee and shared newspapers. In five seconds I construct and live through an entire existence of happiness and peace before reality crashes back and reminds me I'm trapped in this flying torture device. But thank you both for existing dear hostesses.
Oh damn, You! Person behind me. I'm not turning around but I'm hating you with every molecule of my being. Your continuous need to push my seat is psychological warfare disguised as restless behaviour. I know the seats are tiny and uncomfortable because we all wanted to save money on this flight, but fuck yourself with something rusty and unlubricated. If I was king of this world I would turn around and break each single finger on your stupid useless hands, snapping them like twigs until you learned the concept of personal boundaries and basic human decency... Or, wait for it... Guillotine!
I turn around.
Wow. A beautiful girl looks directly at me with eyes that contain mysteries I want to solve with inappropriate methods. Who are you, gorgeous creature? Why do you have the number 23 tattooed on your middle finger in perfectly positioned rebellion? What did your father say about that ink? Did he threaten to disown you, or did he just sigh the disappointed sigh of parents everywhere? And your mother, is she as stunning as you? Where are you going alone, and why does your solitude make you even more intriguing? Are you pushing my seat because you hate me, or because you want my attention? Well, you have it now, princess. You have all of it. 23. Snap! Something brushes against my leg. A knee. Not hers obviously. Someone else's knee making unwanted contact with my carefully guarded personal space. My attention fractures, splits like broken glass, the beautiful girl's face blurring as my brain registers this new invasion. The romantic fantasy dissolves into territorial irritation. I'm being colonised by limbs that don't belong to me, conquered by someone who clearly never learned the sacred mathematics of airplane seat boundaries. This guy sitting in 22E has something fundamentally strange about his personal space requirements. He really needs to keep his legs spread like he's claiming territorial rights to half the aircraft. He must have a pair of huge and delicate balls. He's touching me with his knee, his elbow, his entire existence spilling over into my carefully rationed square footage. I feel uncomfortable in ways that would require therapy to fully unpack. We're all complicit in our own torture, passengers in steerage pretending we're too smart to pay for comfort while suffering the consequences of our economic wisdom.
"Sir?" The hostes says, with such a velvet soothing voice, standing in the corridor and looking at me. If only she knew our first son was named Pedro Arthur. "Sir, the plane is about to land. Could you please store your laptop in your bag, you big cunt?" Spanish accent right? Olé, vamos! I am pretty sure she did say cunt though.
Turns out I can keep writing on my phone notes app. Now I can see the airport below from the scratched plexiglass. Tiny buildings and roads spreading like a miniature city built for toy cars. I like miniatures. I like the people who patiently build these little dreamy worlds. Your fingers, so delicate and precise, gentle and meticolous. What can you do with that? I can hear the landing gear grinding out of the belly of this metal beast, mechanical groans that promise solid ground and breathable air. But now we're taking off again, climbing back into the sky like a bird that's forgotten how to land. What the fuck, that was scary. The baby cries again. We're orbiting around planet Earth, circling our destination like vultures around our own corpses, just because the landing runway was busy, the captain announcing it, proud we're still alive. Just pull the exit lever and escape. Just reach over, yank that handle, and fly back to whatever planet spawned us, or embrace the monster I've become at this altitude, where oxygen deprivation meets social claustrophobia and creates something beautiful and terrible and completely unhinged.
Monster. Yes. That's exactly what I am on seat 22D, flight 7791 to Barcelona.