Suspended romance

I have had a few crazy romantic moments, but I don’t believe anything has come close – on the craziness scale that is – to what happened to me when I was 16 years old and traveling between Miami and Rio de Janeiro. Some of my friends have heard this story and agree that it is pretty unique. And random, as well. Randomness seems to have been a theme in my life for a while now.

I’m traveling with my parents and little brother on a Brazilian airline. It’s evening. Turbulence turns kinda bad on the flight by my standards, from pretty early on. For some reason I’m becoming hysterical (this is the only time that would ever happen even though I’m hardly a fan of flying). One of the flight attendants, very sweet and helpful, comes by and offers to have me visit the pilot’s cabin. (This was before 9/11; they don’t allow this anymore, I think.) When I get to the cabin, another girl is there, with green eyes and long brown hair, crouching in a seat close to the co-pilot. She has been more hysterical than I over the shaking. The flight attendant stays on for a while with soothing words, then leaves as the extremely nice pilot and co-pilot take over calming us down on top of having to, well, tend to the plane. The turbulence magically stops. Two boys come in. They are brothers – the pilot’s sons.

We are all making pleasant talk, including the pilot and co-pilot. Us four teenagers start reading a magazine together and making each other laugh. This is the first time I notice my own irreverence and flirtiness, and how it’s having an effect; I like it, although I can’t believe it’s coming out of my mouth. (This was three years after my first real kiss and I was coming out of a dry spell, with boys up to that point much preferring to make fun of me than make out with me.) Hours go by and we don’t leave the cabin – not even to pee, I think. No one tells us to leave. We forget all about our fear of flying. At some point, the green-eyed girl sits with one of the pilot’s sons on the right side of the cabin, and I sit with the other on the left side, behind the pilot. I look out the panoramic window next to me; at 30,000 feet and without parts of the plane blocking our view, the sky is a perfect black dome, the stars unspoiled, like scintillating decorations on a curtain. (I would only see a similar sky again 10 years later, way down there, in the Sahara desert.) The boy pressed next to me is cute, with his dark brown hair slightly curly, brown eyes, tanned skin, a small mole on his nose.

He kisses me.

It’s irresistible. His kiss is nice and soft, and I want more. I glance over and notice that the other girl and boy are kissing, too. I look at the pilot and the co-pilot. They are quiet and seemingly frozen in their seats. They do not look behind them.

I’m not sure how long we all kiss for, but the sun comes up at some point. The flight attendant brings us all breakfast. So surreal. Still, no one asks us to leave. I decide to leave at some point, shortly before landing, in case my parents think I have been hijacked. I sit next to my mother with a huge grin on my face. She asks me what happened. (I think that I tell her and that she tells me to keep it quiet.)

I manage to get the boy’s contact information before we get off the plane. We talk once – maybe twice – back on the ground. Although we agreed to try to meet again, we would never manage to. This is the first lesson of many I remember being given on how some wildly special people and situations in life are meant to remain just moments, self-contained. I have not yet fully learned to accept that. It is high time to do so, however, with the kind of life (of constant hopping around) I have chosen. More on that to come in later posts.