Flying Solo

Illustration: Amelia Tran

What we can’t learn from people watching.

The person in front of the check-in desk is flying to Las Vegas for their 21st birthday celebration, anxiously awaiting what is supposed to be the craziest weekend filled with events only made possible by the elusive strip. 

Two people hurriedly rush through security, they are probably going to miss their flight. As they cram small plastic bottles of shampoo into an overflowing backpack, their faces exude stress, and they ever so slowly embark on the next phase of their vacation – at the mercy of airline rebooking prices. 

A toddler wails a few rows away and several heads pop up like gophers surveying the area, desperate to find the culprit.

At last, I disembark from the plane and re-enter my reality. A reality that nobody will ever quite understand, even if they too boarded the same flight. Growing up, I was fascinated by the people I would observe in airports, doing exactly the same thing as I was doing, except I was completely nescient of their motivations. I would entertain myself in the long waiting lines by guessing where these people were going but ultimately, it was just a guess based on my own narrow life experiences. I think this was largely inspired by the self-centred, characteristically child-like presumption that everyone’s life must be exactly like mine. If I was going to visit my cousins, then surely every other passenger on the plane must also be doing the same thing.

Now I sit in the airport, still playing the same guessing game, except now I am acutely aware of the missing information. I now realize that even if the person sitting beside me is also going to visit their cousins, the similarities in our lives likely begin and end with our reason for getting on the plane. Their journey will be unique and just as I will never fully understand what they are experiencing, they will never know what it is like to visit my cousins and spend a day in my life. The prospect of this seems incredibly isolating. Here we are on the same airplane, possibly having the same motivation for our travel, having eerily similar experiences, yet I know that our experiences will remain similar- rather than identical. 

Does the fact that we will never truly know who each other are, even if we have been best friends for years or have grown up in the same household, even matter? Or maybe sharing a flight path is enough. Maybe it’s sufficiently comforting to endure one experience with another person that the need to experience an entire life together is humanity being greedy. In this case, life would consist of little scenes where we overlap and truly understand each other, with the rest being filled in by one’s imagination. But surely there must exist a reason why we gravitate to those we share the most experiences with; being able to understand another person is easier when we have less of their life to imagine.

We hear all the time ‘put yourself in somebody else’s shoes’ as a prompt to act per how we think the other person is feeling, but truthfully, I am not sure we will ever be able to truly ‘be in somebody else’s shoes’. I will never understand the person celebrating their 21st in Vegas, or people on the precipice of missing their flight - unfortunately, I may be able to understand the latter- nor them, me. But instead of ending with a solipsistic barrier that renders humans unable to connect with one another, the airport reminds me that none of us know who each other are. I find that almost comforting; that the one thing we all share is this impossibility of fully donning ‘another person’s shoes’. And while I can hope that my identification of a girl who is excited about a trip with her best friends who she loves dearly is accurate, I know that I will never know the truth of this. In essence, I will always be travelling solo.