The woman on my right was watching an anime on her small tablet, and every few minutes I peeked at her screen. There were magazines in the front pocket about 10 Hot Things To Do In Beijing, but I liked to roll up the window and stare down at the clouds, which weren’t lined up in one stormy lint sheet, but instead spread out haphazardly in small silver tufts that I barely made out in the black sky. In biology I learned that this was called clumped distribution.

In the background Bill Evans played softly, but I don’t remember if it came out of my headphones or from my memory. Either way, the chords rolled over me as I looked down on miniscule lights flickering butterscotch and honey. Every time another one flicked on, I liked to think another person woke up, and maybe they were yawning or humming to themselves. Maybe one of them was even humming Bill Evans.

I reached into my backpack to get a See’s Candies butterscotch lollipop. 

“Oh man, I love those too.” the anime watching woman said.

I smiled big. “I know, they’re so good right?” I said, digging up a second one to offer her.

Keep your seatbelts on, the captain directed in a crackly voice overhead. 

My fingers pressed into the thick window glass and left marks against the condensation. I learned about the three stages of matter in a fourth grade Lawrence Hall of Science presentation. I spelled out my name in swirling letters before erasing it with my palms. The sky lightened to a graphite grey, and drawing on the plane window reminded me of making skid marks with my shoes on a rained-on sidewalk.

The airplane was one of the bigger models with the seat pattern of two, three, and two. I sat on the very left of my row in a Viking style “head of the table” way, I almost felt like a mother looking at this mismatched lineup of strangers. The plane smelled clean and fresh, and the man sitting at the very opposite end of our row might smell like that too, I thought. The younger girl sleeping two seats to my right might play guitar like me. 

I felt a small, insistent connection to the people inside this plane, the people we were flying above, and the people waiting to pick me up at the international airport. In this solid plane, I was at equilibrium. I felt like a small star harboring a huge solar system, and I didn’t even have to know the name of each planet to take it into my gravitational pull. 

In my middle school science class, I learned about inertia.

After a nap, I rolled up the window again. Looked in the glass oval, and watched the sun begin the climb up, sweeping the sky in dandelion yellow like rust crawling up a bicycle. The clouds were pearly and sparse, and the plane was saturated with ambient chatter and faint Bill Evans. The city on the ground is bustling and bright, and the people are doing anything and everything possible today.