In Flight

                One the flight had levelled off and H had stopped thinking about the possibility of his death, wondering how many people would attend his funeral and what would be said, he was able to focus on reading. Although, his actual focus was on the girl sitting next to him. Specifically, he was focused on the positioning of her left arm, which was nearly touching his. Were they almost touching arms out of some sort of intentional gesture? How much of his interpretation of the event was based on his desire to begin speaking with her? In point of fact, if he was sitting next to an elderly man or woman, he probably would be interpreting the same gesture as one of hostility, a laying claim of territory that was by all rights, his. He had read somewhere that when you felt comfortable with someone you started to mimic their gestures, and he was trying to figure out if the two of them were breathing in and out at the same rate. They were! Though he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t already started to regulate his breathing in accordance with that knowledge, in fact, there was a good chance that their breathing wasn’t similar at all.

                Again it struck him, far more than the pages he was turning without really comprehending the main ideas that all of his thoughts were contingent. If he found the person next to him unattractive, every gesture would mean something entirely different. There was a chance, maybe even a good chance that the girl was entirely unattracted to him and was not noticing the fact that their arms were almost touching. Or she had registered it, and was secretly annoyed at the proximity, feeling that the space was hers, though by virtue of sitting in the middle seat he felt that the shared arm rests were probably his. Maybe she hadn’t noticed him at all, which seemed to actually be the case. Maybe she was just intently scrolling through the songs on her iPod trying to find the right song to pass the time.

He was reading a novel by Henry James that was set in Italy. The portion he was reading was a description of a villa in some part of Italy, Florence maybe? It was possible to read something without registering any of the words. If he moved his arm a quarter of an inch or so, the two of them would be touching. She was listening to music, ear buds in, her arms flat on both arm rests. He had never been to Italy, or anywhere for that matter. This trip out east was only the second time he’d left the Pacific time zone. This didn’t entirely matter as reading never evoked anything visually for him anyway. The words were just symbols on a page, which his mind made no effort to decode or to make corresponding images of. If a character was said to have long red hair and a snub nose, in his mind, he pictured nothing. That was not probably what authors intended. Or did they? Why bother describing someone if it didn’t matter to the reader?