To compensate for the worst summer of my life, my mother sent me to Los Angeles with my older sister. We drove together and then I flew home alone.
I had forgotten to do my summer reading for school until the days before I got on this flight and decided reading would be a welcome way to dissociate from the flying PVC pipe I was about to get on. I had no idea what the book was about and thought it would make great airplane reading, based on its size alone. I estimated I could finish the book by the end of my three/four hour flight.
I sat on the plane sandwiched between two families. Family 1 played musical chairs for most of the flight and wore matching blue yamakas. Family 2 was comprised of young children inclined to quietly stare at passengers like they were celebrities they couldn’t quite place. I was grateful for their noise and their ease, which made the flight feel more like church youth trips I used to take, a casual cacophony of invincible young people.
I cracked the book and immediately realized this was not like other light summer readings I had been assigned. Instead of opening a book like The Alchemist, The Great Gatsby, or whatever Shakespeare the school system was obsessed with that year, I opened Night by Elie Wiesel.
Night is a memoir of Wiesel's and his father’s experience in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. I realize now that reading harrowing survival stories have become a thing I do when I get on flights that I’m particularly nervous about. I usually hate horror films, but on the second flight I ever got on I watched Get Out, which follows a black man who is anxious about meeting his white girlfriend’s parents for the first time. His fears prove to be justified.... The question for me remains: Is it better to occupy myself with someone else’s problems so that I’m not occupied my own?
When we reached cruising altitude, I was already holding back tears: Elie’s father died before my eyes.
With the pressing eyes of the kids from Family 2 staring at me and the sounds of Yiddish coming from Family 1, I felt like I was in an episode of What Would You Do? My middle-child heart was telling me to get it together and not be a bother, and yet I started to cry. As fucked up as it is, I couldn’t help but think about the families surrounding me. Their blessed noise diminished by the circumstances of the book.
I finished the book as we started our descent. The plane landed and I was finally able to make quiet eye contact with Families 1 and 2. We smiled those polite, apologetic smiles you share with people you don’t know but have been in close proximity with for hours on end.
Looking back I probably went completely unnoticed by other passengers. Rambunctious kids on a four-hour flight are way more attention-grabbing than a 16-year-old crying over her summer reading.... And now, each time I get on a flight and feel nervous, I think of those kids.