Reflections from a Chair 35,000 feet in the Sky

The air is so dry my contacts have glued themselves to my eyeballs. It’s everything I can do to pry them off and relieve them with glasses. The lights are dim as people start to wake up from restless, upright sleeps. Arms stretch above the chairs; the Japanese girl next to me massages her feet. A dull murmur begins to arise, interspersed with yawns as everyone starts to stir. The smell of hashbrowns and scrambled eggs fills the cabin. When I lift up the window-shade, I see the top of fluffy white clouds as the aircraft soars due east, into the sunrise.

We will arrive before we depart. We will touch down in Vancouver before we even took off from Tokyo. So where are we now? What time is it, really? It was 6pm on Friday when we departed Japan. It will be 10:30am when we arrive in Vancouver, over 7 hours earlier, on exactly the same day.

We’ve been living and breathing for hours in a pocket of time that literally does not exist. We’ve watched movies, read magazines, eaten meals. We are sitting in an imaginary time capsule, rocketing at 586 miles per hour above a sea of clouds, soaring into yesterday as we lounge in our chairs in the sky.

From one side of the world to the other in less than 12 hours. The world is, all at once, such a wonderfully large and miraculously small place. Goodbye Korea, Hello Vancouver. I can’t wait to drink tap water again. :)