The Window Seat

The departure board changed again at 5:40 in the morning. Not cancelled. Just later.

Elias moved his bag to the empty seat beside him and watched the gate fill the way gates do before sunrise: quietly, everyone pretending to be more awake than they were. He knew the rhythm by now. Coffee from the one stand that was open. Phone at forty percent. Another city he would mostly see through glass.

Across the aisle, an older man was reading a small paperback Bible with a rubber band around it. He read without hurry, one thumb holding his place, the way some people pray. He wasn’t reading to be seen. That was probably why Elias kept looking.

The man noticed, eventually. He didn’t seem to mind.

“Early one,” he said.

“They’re all early ones.”

The man smiled as if that were a fair answer and turned a page. “Heading home?”

It was the most ordinary question in the world. People ask it in airports a hundred times an hour. Elias opened his mouth to say the name of the next city and found he couldn’t say it with that word attached.

“Not exactly,” he said.

“Hm.” The man nodded slowly, as if “not exactly” were a real place too. He didn’t ask anything else. He went back to his reading, and Elias was surprised by how much he wanted him to ask.

The agent called the first boarding group. His group; he always boarded early now. He stood, then hesitated and looked back. The man was still reading. Somebody’s daughter was asleep on her backpack. A cleaner pushed a slow cart past the windows, where the dark was beginning to thin.

On the plane he did the things he always did. Bag up. Phone off. Shoes left on, because taking them off felt like settling in, and he never really settled in.

They climbed through the cloud just as the sun came up. It lit the top of everything at once, a whole white country with nobody in it, and for a moment Elias forgot to look at it the way he looked at most things now, as something he had already seen.

I got everything I wanted, he thought. It wasn’t a complaint. It was simply true. One by one he had wanted things, and one by one they had come, and at some point he had stopped noticing that there was nothing left to want.

Why do I still feel lost?

He didn’t have an answer, and he wasn’t going to find one at thirty-five thousand feet. He knew that. But the question had a shape now. He had said it, even if only to himself, and that felt different from carrying it around unspoken.

He thought of the rubber band, the thumb holding a place.

Below the wing, the light kept spreading. Elias left the shade up the whole way.