Please put your seats into the upright position.

A strange and emotionally taxing day (little of which, ironically, had anything to do with relationships) led me to contemplate my life-long fascination with airplanes, air travel, airports and the like. If you know me at all, flying on planes is a secret indulgence of mine; traveling the world's airports one day is a quiet ambition. There is definitely some irony, I think, in that suspended state of novelty: that flight, or travel in general, is a mere state of transition between the daily grind and vacation, home and away, the real world and the fantasy, point A and point B, etc.

However, it is flight, it seems to me, that is the only slice of the "real" world there is in that whole process; the only pure moment of simply existing. The rest of the time, our lives are (if you'll forgive the T.S. Elliott reference) crudely stitched together pieces of the past and the projected future. We are always on track, on schedule, even on that all-expenses-paid trip, quantifying and compacting whatever fleeting pieces of the "moment" we do hold.

Be here at this time, meet at this place, prepare something to turn in, gather things up to check out. But in the air, there is nothing to stay on track of. Meals are made just for that moment - single-serving cheese, single-serving fruit cup, single-serving innocuous dish. There are never any leftovers, any save-for-laters, save the bag of peanuts you kept from those first fifteen minutes after take off. And even then, it's a snack of the moment - not something that required planning a trip to the shop, and traveling and the spending of money, but the instant satisfaction of a fleeting belly-growl. You become nothing but a property of that frame in time. You half-watch that romantic comedy not because you like it, but because you've seen the rest and there is nothing else you can or should be doing. And that is beautiful; that is what real life is. It is you scanning through the in-flight magazine with the obscure jazz artist or pan-Asian chef on the cover. It is being impressed by the music selection on the airline's alternative station, not because you don't have your iPod, but because you are lost in that state of your old glory, when there is nothing in the moment but what treasures the sandbox may hold. It's about not being able to sleep or concentrate on anything except the clouds gliding away beneath the hull and soon you catch yourself wondering what it would be like to just jump out of that window and land on a puff of cumulus; to skip quick miles on those nimbuses, diving and floating like you know you can't and you just don't get how that's not possible because they look so full and thick. And when the plane is passing right through them, turning that crystalline fluff into pieces of ghost, you still stick with the cotton-candy faith you had when you were a kid on your first plane ride.

Upon landing, you'll race to get your bags and get to the hotel and crash from the time difference or you'll fight traffic to get home and crash from the culture shock and disappointment of the return to rat race and routine. And there's always at least a little part of you that's appeasing someone other than yourself, but up in the sky there is only your half-finished can of Diet 7UP, no smoking in the lavatories and dreams of dancing away over the tiny life below as your weight shifts under a fuzz blanket.

Tiny life, Palahniuk called it. He's right.