Why I Cry On Planes

Musings on a flight to LA

I cry on planes. I think it’s the anonymity. Up there I’m just some girl with her AirPods in, traveling to her destination. I rarely listen to upbeat music on a flight. I think it’s the proximity to heaven. It seems like too perfect an opportunity to open up my soul and reach out, like I could almost touch my mother, the future, the lost ones, the mystery of it all.

Given the current headlines and my ongoing state of melancholy I decided to watch an all-time favorite of mine, Arrival. This film is unmatched when it comes to movies about aliens and one of the best films to watch at 30,000 feet in general. I think it’s because of the God-ness of the story, the concept of space and time and reality becoming simultaneously irrelevant and more confining.

I’ll never be the one who deciphers the meaning of life—best any of us could hope to do is form an opinion of our own, one that may guide or instruct us, maintain some kind of parameters around our morality and ambition. Still, this film brings me closer to some form of the truth than nearly any other. It’s something difficult to explain, an understanding I forget until the next time I watch it alone. In just the right mood and light and elevation, it reminds me.

In the film, Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a language and translation expert, recruited by the US military to head the team charged with communicating with aliens who’ve just landed on Earth. She’s brilliant and ultimately successful, but her melancholia never leaves, even in the happy moments. She wrestles with visions and dreams, memories and prophecies. She knows how the story will end, still, she continues. I think there’s something comfortable about that to me, something I’ve spent years trying to chase away, smooth over for lovers and friends. Perhaps, this knowing was a catalyst for my drinking. Nevertheless, I relate to Dr. Banks’ inability to let things go and the loneliness that comes with carrying the grief and hope of someone else that never asked you to.

Amy Adams as “Dr. Louise Banks” in Arrival, Photo Credit: Jan Thijs | Copyright 2016 Paramount Pictures

I think an awful lot about time, mostly where it goes when it’s gone. I can’t say for sure, but I am fairly certain that everything that’s ever happened still exists, just the same with moments yet to come. The love I can’t shake, the smell of my mother’s breath after coffee and cigarettes, the morning light in a room I haven’t entered yet, the books and films and moments I long to create—all just as real as this flight to Los Angeles for a friend’s wedding. Flying feels like the closest thing we have to inter-dimensional travel. I take off at eight in the morning in Dallas and arrive at ten in the morning in LA. The flight is four hours long. I’ve jumped back in time, traveled to a place where I technically haven’t chosen between coffee and tea or trail mix and cookies, where the back of a man’s head, the curvature of his neck and a single gold earring, hasn’t made me turn my head and weep out the tiny window overlooking the wing of a commercial jet.

Do you ever wonder if it’s all right here all the time? If we have any say in the matter? If the days are strung together like a perfect pearl necklace, each priceless treasure in perfect order, all leading to a chorus in unison, “Well, done.” What does it matter? What does it mean? Can we actually change anything? Would we want to if we could?

I think of the pain. Surely, I’d trade in some of that? I don’t think I could. It occurs to me that the most pain-filled moments are directly tied to the most sacred ones. Mother’s last breath was the moment I cracked open, the moment so much of this place made sense. The grief of love lost only exists because of the love, it’s the proof. Without profound sadness we’d have no need for hope or faith or joy. To erase any one of my desperate nights would erase the courage I had to muster to go on, the resilience that followed. To alter one hour of agony disrupts the process that follows—the rising. I can’t go back.

I can’t stop what’s already in motion, and we’re all always in motion. Like the plane hurling me towards a past life in California, we’re all always on the way. Life moves forward though it’s not always linear. I step back to see the road ahead more clearly and speed up to catch a break. The thing I thought I left behind shows up around the corner and instantly I’m transported to a hypothetical future. I never said I have the answers, only that when I’m flying high above the Earth I can’t help but to ponder them. My sadness suits the skies. She wonders, too. Will it rain today? Where has my mother gone? Will I have a child someday? When will I meet the one to whom I can reveal all of my secrets?

I resolve to stop overthinking it all, to write a book and take the world for a lover.

I carry mountains of grief, the by-product of the rivers of love that still belong to me. I can’t help but be curious about it all. In Arrival, Banks asks, “If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?” My answer is I’m not sure we can. I’m not sure that anything we lose is ever gone. I’m not sure that I was ever anywhere but here. I’m not sure we understand how time really works yet.

On a 737 I can write it all down. I can let the tears fall freely and gaze into the darkness of an endless night, an infinite universe where nothing is ever lost for good. There’s no cell service, no one to tell me I have no right to play with words or still love them. Just me, the window seat, ex and future loves, mother’s new home, a blank page, and a classic piano chord. At just the right altitude I am a writer and they are all still here.

Me, overthinking on a beach somewhere in Southern California