Somewhere 30,000 feet in the clouds on a red-eye flight to Barcelona, I made a friend. I couldn’t consider her a friend in the traditional sense of the word. In truth, I don’t know where she is now, or where she lives, or how I’d even reach her, but the faint memory of our brief, serendipitous encounter glimmers in my memory with the same fondness I’d associate with an old friend.
Her name is Joan. Joan is divorced, she doesn’t have children, she is 61 years old and her birthday is two days before my mother’s. Immediately upon taking off, she orders a glass of wine, and then another. I start to think Joan is me, 30 years in the future. I’ve taught her how to ask for more wine in Spanish and she’s mastered the new phrase instantly, ordering us both another round, to which the flight attendant reluctantly obliges.
While the bodies around us slip away blissfully into the throes of sleep, through red-stained teeth we share intimate truths with each other, the kind that lay dormant during the daytime, the kind that the shadow of the night beckons forth with a natural ease, hours past sundown when real life begins to feel like a lucid dream. I’d become so accustomed to the strained, scripted routine of small talk that I’d forgotten it was possible to connect with a stranger this way – that a conversation could be unpretentious and raw. In the age of social media, where we choose to only reveal the best bits of ourselves, it is a rare and precious feeling to choose vulnerability instead – to share with someone the unfiltered truth and not feel concerned about how it will be received.
I ask Joan if deep inside she still feels like the same woman she was at 30, my eyes gleaming in the soft glow of the tiny television screens in front of us. In my mind I’m pleading for her to say she does; it terrifies me to think I’ll lose this version of myself as I get older, that one day I’ll look in the mirror and not even recognize the girl on the other end. She says in some ways she feels the same and in some ways she doesn’t; that it is an inevitable truth that the hurdles of the human experience will transform us.
I think it might be the biggest takeaway that I carry with me into my thirties. I’ve spent the majority of my twenties trying to “find myself” but the reality is that the journey is no longer about finding myself at all. It’s no longer about chasing this illusion of a completed version of myself, but accepting that I am already complete, already whole, at this very moment. It’s about accepting that this version of me is fleeting – we are fluid creatures; a constant ebb and flow of change persists in our subconscious minds. We grow and we experience both beautiful and terrible things and through it all, we shed layers of ourselves only to reveal new ones.
I must admit, I don’t know what I’m doing. The seatbelt sign flashes on as we hit a bout of turbulence and I’m venting to Joan about my dating life. The closing finale of my twenties is approaching and I can’t help but feel like I’m suspended in a limbo between my generation and the one that came before mine. I see my mother and all of the women of her generation who have lived and loved and married and had children, and I see the women my age following in their footsteps in a gradual procession, and I wonder if I’m bound to follow the same path or if I’m possibly sentenced by fate to a life of solitude. I can’t decide whether either path is wrong; one could be considered unconventional, yes, but the older I get, the more I resonate with feeling unconventional.
Anyway…
Eventually, an irritable passenger on the flight asks Joan and I to shut up, respectfully, and with enough wine in our systems we both peacefully fall into a deep sleep right up until the Captain announces the final descent into Barcelona. It is early afternoon when we land; two passengers next to me strike up a conversation about the weather and all at once I am catapulted back into reality. Still drowsy from the flight and probably a little hungover, Joan and I exchange a stiff goodbye and a nice to meet you, and just like that, two generations of women embark on their separate treks into a foreign country – both bound to have two entirely different experiences, but nonetheless similar in their desire to break through the confines of routine, if not for a brief moment. To feel something.
I fall in love with Spain through the eyes of the 29-year old version of me, a version both confident and uncertain, still curious enough about the world to take unsound risks but old enough to know just when to pull back. A version naive enough to love everyone around her unconditionally but jaded enough by life to keep the innermost parts of her heart guarded. I am grateful for her in all of her fluidity, grateful for this skin I am in, and ultimately, grateful for the present (in all of its unconventional-ness.)
