Notes from a barf bag

I’m at 30,000 feet and my mind is keeping pace with the Boeing 737 I’m trapped in. I don’t fly often, but generally when I do, I sleep the whole time. But getting through TSA was a nightmare, and I’m far too amped up to sleep or read. I’d do anything to write right now, but I volunteered to check my carry on because the fight was full and I didn’t think to pull out my computer. And just my luck, I forgot to pack a small notebook in my purse.

I double check now, hoping that magical thinking will, just for once, come to my aid. Nope. There’re two pens, however, and quadruple the anxiety.

And if the voices in my head weren’t loud enough, the pint-sized hooligan in front of me is batting away a veritable buffet of organic snacks from his pleading mother while slamming his blinds up! down! up! down! up! down! and screaming, “penis-head!” at his exasperated father.

I wince.

Next to me, a remarkably slim 20-something is taking up all her seat and 50% of mine, a feat she manages while munching donut holes and watching Gillmore Girls on her laptop. It’s mystifying but rather than comment on her wildly swinging legs and arms that keep bumping me, I make my lg/xl frame as small as possible, smashing myself against the plane wall like I’m drywall putty. Oh, for paper! How’d I’d eviscerate her in fiction!

 And just for fun, we’re situated one row from the back, so there’s a constant parade of passengers visiting the latrine, not to mention the inevitable smells and sounds that accompany such a location. That hydraulic *swish!*…

That’s it! WASTE!

I rifle through my seat pocket until I come up with the airline barf bag and start scribbling. I’ve written on hotel stationery. I’ve written on receipts. I’ve written on napkins, and I’ve written notes on myself in a pinch. But writing on a barf bag is a first and it feels great.  

The thing is, unlike the napkin and receipt situation, I don’t have some brilliant story idea that must be captured for fear of being lost to middle age brain fog or an ADHD squirrel thought. *swish!*

 I just need to write, because that’s what writers do. I need to write about almost leaving my phone in the airport restroom, and how much I already miss Oscar, my dog, and how this is essentially morning pages even though they aren’t in my official Morning Page Journal, and how I don’t know what to expect on this trip, or next week, or in life, but holy crap! The mountains! Which range are we flying over?! I let the words flow. Well, not flow, we hit turbulence once or twice, so they’re kinda messier than my normally messy.

My neighbor notices my writing material just as I use up all available exterior surface area and enthusiastically volunteers hers and her boyfriend’s. I forgive her 75% of her chair rattling and leg-bumping.  *swish!* I continue with my high-altitude musings.  

We jet through clouds puffy enough they’d break our fall or bounce a cherubic harp-strumming infant; clouds far above the mountain peaks, and it occurs to me that my head is quite literally in them. I giggle, wondering if there’s a more ironically, iconically, perfect place to write.

I have no idea if these clouds are cumulus, or strato-cumulus, or whatever. But my 6-year old imagination sees wedding veils and elephant ears and puffs of smoke from corn cob pipes.

The plane’s wings are searing hot, however, slicing through the condensation and the cotton candy in the same way my naysayers have, telling me publication odds as if I don’t know them, fileting my life’s calling with sarcasm because it’s socially acceptable. Because the arts, and writing fiction, isn’t a real job. Commercial piloting. Now there’s a respectable career choice with good money and nice perks.

Out my window, above and to the east, the sky is a piercing gradient of ice cube blue to cadet gray. Below us, an opaque carpet of swirling white-gray wool obscures any view of the ground. All that’s visible is the sun when she decides to come out and be social, which she does the second half of the flight. It’s the perfect conditions for a Luck Dragon, but try as I might, I don’t spot one.

 *swish!*

As we descend, the landscape takes on the familiar green, blue, and tan patchwork quilt appearance. What clouds remain look like batting that my ex’s dog, George, once disemboweled out of an old family comforter—dollops of fluff on the wrong side of the stitching. One by one they disappeared, and movement on the ground becomes visible.

I made it to my destination, but I’d be lying if I said I was sorry that that god-awful, incredible flight was over. People sometimes say that writers have their heads in the clouds like it’s a bad thing. Au, contraire, my friends! That is exactly where my head should be. TSA aside, I look forward to the next time when it can literally and figuratively come true.