Greetings from the exit row

 

Anyone who knows me can tell you that travel is not something I’m fond of. Every term around week six, I start to curse myself for not being a minimalist, the prospect of having to wear the unfoldable free pink cowboy hat I acquired during Chappell Roan night at Bridge to the airport suddenly too daunting to bear. I freak out about how I’m going to get to the airport days in advance, losing sleep in anticipation of having to wake up at 5 AM to shove my duvet into an ill-fitting box and, having missed the only bus this hour (a struggle exclusive to residents of OX2), run like hell to Gloucester Green.

 

 

On the bus, I consider every possible disaster scenario as if I’m headed towards my gig as an extra on Final Destination. What if I don’t have the right visa? Or my suitcase is too heavy, and the extra cost rivals my tuition fee? Or the plane was rescheduled earlier for some reason? Or, worst of all, the plane was cancelled and I have to climb back out of the seventh circle (a.k.a. Stansted Airport), just to come back tomorrow?

 

 

In response to my bimonthly breakdown, my friends nod solemnly and say, I get it; you’re an anxious flyer. That’s not quite it, though. Once I’ve made it through check-in, passport control, endured the headache-inducing lights at my gate for no less than two hours (too wired to even check Duty Free), and finally sat down at my exit row seat (absolutely worth the risk for the leg room), a sense of total calm descends over me. The variables have suddenly narrowed considerably, you see: either the unthinkable happens, and you crash and burn with your dignity and fuzzy socks, or you sit exactly where you are until you get served uncooked pasta and barely seasoned chicken, or, God forbid, you have to pee. It’s like being quarantined from society for an indeterminate illness, and the only cure is watching Crazy Rich Asians on repeat for all eternity.

 

 

Both of my parents have been in the foreign service for nearly 30 years. The official uniform of the foreign service is unequivocally sweatpants, a hoodie, a neck pillow, and headphones if you want to survive with only half a migraine. Over the course of my relatively short lifespan, I have become more well-acquainted with the intricacies of a trans-atlantic flight than I am with regular traffic. This summer, I’ve been traveling back and forth from Turkey, my home country, and El Salvador, where my mom is currently stationed. It is a 24 hour journey from door to door, consisting of three flights and two layovers. It is, to put it plainly, exhausting. Even more so when you have to do it four times over the course of three months. But in a way, it’s also the only thing that forces me to rest.

 

 

It’s not an easy feat to be entirely removed from worldly happenings, nowadays. Not only is the political climate incredibly volatile, but there is a certain anxiety that comes with missing out from pop culture that didn’t exist before the social media age. If your WiFi cuts out for even a couple hours, you’re suddenly two derivations of the ‘holding space’ meme behind.

 

 

I think now, more than ever, we are living incredibly lonely lives. In circles like the ones that are prevalent in Oxford, it’s easy to fall victim to the belief that everyone is a cultural despot except you, and that you are always at risk of missing the joke and being excluded from the next conversation. It’s almost impossible to escape the steel grasp of FOMO as a person living in a world where you simply cannot know everything. On a red-eye flight across the Atlantic, that feeling suddenly becomes focused into a comparatively small space, and you come to realise that even loneliness is a collective experience. We are all just playing catch-up in a race that doesn’t have a finish line. It is oddly freeing to be unable to run any further for a while.

 

 

On one of these many flights, my charger suddenly stopped working when my phone was at 15%. Having a 13 hour flight ahead of me, I immediately began to panic. It was an inexplicable knee jerk reaction, my body responding before my brain was able to catch up to the irrationality of it. What was I even planning to do on my phone? Listen to the mere five songs I have downloaded because Spotify takes up an ungodly amount of storage space? There is simply no way of reaching back out into the world I so desperately want to have within my hold. I cannot predict what will happen in the hours that I am away, just like I wouldn’t be able to keep track of every news story and cultural event emerging if I was mindlessly refreshing Twitter for the entire day. The only thing to do is unplug, and let it all unfold 30,000 feet below.