» I Chronically Cry on Airplanes

I cry when I’m on an airplane.

It doesn’t happen every time. It never happens on a red eye, for example, when every opportunity for miserable, uncomfortable sleep must be fully maximized. It doesn’t happen when I’m flying with other people, unless they’re fully asleep or deep in the action movie they can finally watch now that I don’t have movie theater veto power. But it happens 9 times out of the other 10 flights that don’t fall into those categories.

Right now – yes this very moment (ed note: I wrote this in flight from NY to LA) – I’m wiping away salty face drops because three minutes ago I remembered finding a photocopy of the first “book” I ever wrote. It was in the computer room at my parents’ house this weekend. It’s called Lily, and it’s about a flower that disappears from a garden. The other flowers in the garden are really torn up about this lily’s disappearance and so the elder flower of the group (or maybe a farmer? I can’t remember…) sets out to find missing little Lily only to discover a whole field of her kind in a neighboring farm. “Here a lily, there a lily, everywhere a lily, lily,” that page goes. See the lily set out and planted herself elsewhere where she grew and expanded into a whole field of flowers. It doesn’t make a ton of sense and is vaguely sexual in nature, but that’s when I started to cry. Have you ever heard a more poetic rip off of “Old MacDonald Had A Farm?” And the whole thing is such a beautiful allegory of the meaning of life, no? Sometimes we have to disappear and then come alive in a new way. Or, it’s only after we uproot and plant anew elsewhere that we’re really able to flourish. Last week I wrote a dick pic joke into a comedy script, but at six I really had something to say about who we are as humans.

So I’m crying about my five page allegory (complete with hand-drawn pictures), which inspires me to chug my airplane bottle of red and start organizing my wedding photos, which is no way to stop crying. I turn on ESPN hoping sports will shut this charade down but some package about a football player who battled cancer comes on and I’m crying for a whole other reason.

For the record, I do not cry often in real life – two to four times a year, max (flights not included).

This obviously has something to do with thin air, or altitude sickness or whatever chemical process it takes for your skin to go from perfectly normal to covered in a sheet of oil, as it seems required to do on an airplane. It’s like I’m a defenseless version of myself at 33,000 feet. All my normal, super handy tools for not crying at things like the last chapter of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (which I blessedly finished before remembering the “Lily” story or else I would never have finished because thinking of my own first writing and reading about the power of writing would lay me out completely) are rendered useless.

What about being in an uncomfortable, faux leather seat cramped beside two total strangers turns me into the sap I am not? Is it the fact that I’m stuck and can’t distract my way out of whatever emotional thought comes to mind with 5 hours and 23 minutes between New York and L.A.? Is it the harsh reality of that mini, in-seat light shining down on me? Could it be that steady stream of recycled air pouring from the plane ceiling air nipple into my eyes?

The world may never know…

Just kidding! A thousand and one people have already written about this phenomenon! I am not the only freak pretending there’s, “just something in my eye,” while trapped in that tin box in the sky!

And with that we arrive at the new point of this entire blog post: always do a quick Google search before writing an entire blog post!