Sit Next To Me
By: Elena Potek
Tags: Traveling, Technology, Travel, Connection, Wanderlust

Sit Next To Me

I sit down in my chair, 23D, and unzip my headphones from their case on my lap. I like to have them on even without music, to pull out the background noise of the engine and the inevitable babies on board. Already dreading what is coming next, I slide them onto my ears, and turn the button on the right ear to “on.”

“Battery 80%,” the automated lady’s voice says into my ears. “Connecting to Elena’s iphone….connecting to Elena’s iphone….” And then one last time. “Connecting to Elena’s iphone…” “Stop saying that!” I want to shout. Until finally, “Mobile device not found.” There it was. What I needed to hear. The final announcement of what I already knew to be true. But hearing it from some other entity, in a weird way, does help.

I imagine my cell phone, which I had with me not three hours earlier, still driving around in the back of the cab I took to the airport, trying just as hard to connect with my headphones as my headphones are trying to connect with it. But with each passing second they are traveling further and further away from each another. The silence of my headphones feels extra loud in this moment.

As everyone is shuffling into the plane and getting settled, I decide to go to the bathroom before we take off, and walk the few rows behind me to the very back of the plane. There is a woman standing in that open area, charging her phone in one of the only outlets on board. “Salt in the wound,” I think to myself. Oh the days when a dead battery was my biggest issue rather than missing the phone altogether. It’s so much easier to find a plug than to replace all that is now lost.

All that is lost. I can’t let myself think about that for too long or else my eyes start to sting. I go to open the door to the bathroom and am greeted by a man angling himself to pee. I immediately close the door when he turns his head toward me.

“Lock the door!” I shout internally. Great, just great.

When I get back to my seat. A younger woman in a tan trench coat has settled into the window spot and an older woman is in the middle. She has plum colored dress pants on and a black sweater. Her hair is black and wavy, with curls that frame her face and small wire-rimmed glasses. Her nails are trim and polished and she has makeup on and a black face-mask. Her blanket is already unwrapped and she’s tucking it onto her lap, moving her haunches side to side, and flattening her hands on her lap, the universal procedure for getting cozy. She looks at me as I sit down in my aisle seat, her eyes are warm and affectionate.

In an almost conspiratorial tone, she whispers something to me excitedly. I am touched by her attempt to connect with me. Unlike most people, I really do love talking to strangers on flights, but in this case, we are at a stand still, because she whispered to me in Spanish. I give her my one line, like an overly done party trick, the same thing I say to pretty much everyone I interact with who requires more than a “yes” or a “no” from me in South America. At this point, I’ve said it at least 75 times on my trip. “Lo siento….mi espanol…poco poco.” Translated to English this literally comes out to, “Sorry…my Spanish…little little.”

She nods and smiles vigorously and then keeps talking to me in Spanish, as if the stellar one-liner I gave her was me just being…humble?

But I continue to nod along and smile at her underneath my mask, then realize she can’t even see that. Maybe she just wants to have someone to talk to. Even if I can’t understand what she’s saying, I can certainly understand that.

Once we’re in the air, she still keeps trying to talk to me, but now she is fiddling with her seatbelt buckle. Looking down and then back up at me, I stop nodding when I realize just what she may be talking to me about. “Oh do you need help?” I ask her in English. There I go, playing the same game she’s playing with me, talking as if she can understand me, knowing that is very certainly not the case. I make eye contact with her and gesture with my hands going towards her crotch, the best I can do to get at consent without the words to do so. She nods and I lift the buckle from her lap and she is freed. She laughs and gestures to how she was trying to pull the two sides apart by pressing a notch on the side of the buckle rather than lifting it.

As someone who flew twice a week for work for over a year, this small gesture touches on a part of me I can’t quite understand. Here we are sitting side by side and also a world apart. I can’t imagine not knowing how to unbuckle my seatbelt on an airplane. And yet there is something so endearing in this woman, so sweetly grateful in her dependence on me to do it for her.

And in a country where I can’t interact with people beyond saying “I’m sorry I can’t understand you,” I felt useful for the first time in a very long time. She touches my arm and I touch hers back as she readies herself to get up to go to the bathroom.

I get out of my seat to let her go by and sit down until she arrives back again. When we get situated, she reaches down for her purse, under the seat in front of her. It is red, with a patent shine to it and two rigid handles on each side of the zipper that runs down the center. It is medium-sized, big enough to be one of those bags that carries a surprising amount of items within its frame. She reaches her hand in and scrounges around for about a minute before pulling out a bottle of pink spray with a spritz top. She takes the cap off, and uses her right hand to put three spritzes into her left before pointing the bottle in my direction with a nudge. I can tell it is alcohol from the undertones hitting my nose, but from the color and the floral aroma I’m also getting that it is scented, too. I open my hand and she does the same for me, three spritzes. She puts the bottle down on her lap to free her right hand. We both spend the next few seconds sitting in silence, as we each rub our hands together.

Shortly afterwards, the flight attendants come by with the food and drink carts. They hand each of us a ham and cheese sandwich, a bag of almonds, and a square of Pacari dark chocolate, the best brand of chocolate I’ve ever tasted and that is based out of Ecuador. I didn’t buy any to take with me and am pleased that I have one last square to savor.

When the attendant finishes passing us our drinks and continues to roll down the aisle, I turn to the woman next to me and nudge my sandwich her way. “Do you want this?” I’ve given up trying to find the Spanish and figured she’ll understand with the same confidence she seems to carry towards me. “No gusto?” she asks. I could let her know I’ve actually never tried ham in my life and don’t know whether I like it or not and that I’m Jewish and don’t eat pig nor plan to start eating it on this flight with this specific sandwich but instead reply, “Si, no gusto.”

Her mask is off as she is already taking sips of her orange juice and she smiles at me and accepts my sandwich offering.

All of the blinds are starting to come down now. People have eaten and are ready for some sleep; the plane grows darker and darker. I’m busy reading my book and am surprised when I look up and realize I’m basically reading in the dark. I lift my arm above our heads and press my light on, which provides a steady stream of bright white light directly onto the pages of my book. The woman stares, eyes wide, as if I’ve just conducted magic. She reaches down to her purse once again and rummages around before, this time, pulling out a book of her own, clearly happy to have the light she needs to read too.

The book I’m reading is titled, “A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells us About Sexual Relationships,” and the back of the cover in bold letters reads, “The Book on Sex.” The image on the front cover is a pixilated picture of a naked woman. As I read about the big data behind porn and erotica, the biochemistry of what turns on men and women, the science behind why men may be predisposed to search for “MILFs” or “Group Sex,” I can hear muttering beside me. The woman’s finger draws side to side as she whispers along with the lines she is reading. And I can’t help but smile. When I turn to look at what she is reading, I notice it is The Bible, in Spanish.

The woman is leaning into me, not realizing that she has a light of her own she can use. I wonder for a minute if I should leave it like this. The company of this stranger, her warm and giving energy on my shoulder, showing through her comfortability in sharing light with me. And even with Covid, I don’t mind this intrusion into my personal space. But knowing she’ll be able to read better with the light that goes directly to her seat, I reach up and put hers on for her with a smile. She gives a surprised little “Oh” and overly gestures her leaning on me with a laugh. I respond “No, no that’s okay!” with a laugh too. She settles back into her seat, her finger goes back to tracing the lines of her Bible and her mouth begins to move again.

Here we are, two women, sitting side by side.

One of us, I can only imagine, has flown less than she can count on her hands, maybe a single one, the other speaks only English but yearns to know the language the other tries to share with her so easily. One just read this line in her book: “I can jill off to just about anything,” while the other probably read something that had a “thou” or a “shalt not” in it. They have at least 40 years between them, years that were likely filled with joy and strife, pain and laughter, as any 40 years are bound to be. Each has different dietary rules, both have a propensity to pee a lot and enjoy connection with others, no matter how small or dysfunctional that interaction may be.

The premise of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” is two data scientists who took 400 million web-searches in the span of 12 months from some of the largest search engines across the world. They mined these searches and whittled them down to ones that could be classified as “erotic” and then further categorized those by specific sexual interest. Using this information, they explored what desire means, what we look for, and why that may be. And while there are many takeaways from this intriguing book, one that I’m still thinking about is: “The vast majority of our desires are shared by crowds of other people.”

They found, through their research, that 20 different interests account for 80% of all searches. “With less than two dozen interests, you can satisfy the desires of almost everyone who uses a search engine to find erotic content.” And while this is just speaking about sexual interests, that truth goes so far beyond this one facet of any one of our lives. So often we try to siphon sexuality off as a appendage of self, when in fact I believe it to be the bedrock. What we need and yearn for and desire in the bedroom becomes a microcosm for what it means to live a whole and free life in all aspects of our existence. If we let it.

Thousands of feet up in the air, somewhere over South America, that woman and I shared intimate space together. Five hours of our lives, which is nothing and everything. The details of our differences, and there were many, never seemed to matter. There was so much more that was the same. This truth seeped into my bones, and it felt beautiful.