I enjoy flying

Packing for my first trip to London last week, forced to reduce years of shopping — shelves and boxes of books, bags of shoes, mounds of clothes — into two suitcases, my boyfriend asked if I had everything. "Nope," I’d replied, "I don’t have you. Fold up yourself small and jump in nah." We’d laughed but the truth remains that, in preparing to leave one life behind and to begin another in a new country, the things I truly wished to take couldn’t fit into a suitcase.

I know that saying one likes to fly now is considered old fashioned, gauche.

One is supposed to pretend it is a huge bother, an irritation, an unnecessary interruption in a life that is filled with purpose and meaning.

Previously, entire villages came to see one off. Maxis and vans would bring granny, tanti, cousin, neighbour to say goodbye to the lucky individual who stood, the centre of attention and envy, dressed in clothes bought specifically for the occasion of flying. Nowadays, grungy jeans are paired with slippers, goodbyes are said at home to avoid embarrassment.

Businessmen at the airport look at their watches impatiently. They pull out laptops and check their email, talk loudly on their cell phones giving out last minute instructions to co workers and secretaries until the flight attendant asks them politely to stop, the plane is about to take off.

Harassed mothers try to control children. Most people try to sleep during the flight, chat with those they are travelling with about humdrum things, the laundry they didn’t have time to wash, wondering when the meal will be served.

But me, I love to fly. I always ask for a window seat and there, with nose touching pane, I watch the miracle that has become commonplace. I love when the plane starts, slowly but surely, to take off down the runway, building speed until that great moment when gravity is defied and the plane lifts off, your stomach left behind for a few seconds until it hurries and catches up with you up there in the sky.

From the VIP seat that is every window seat Trinidad is the loveliest of places. The highway lies straight and true, seems fully capable of its important task of connecting the four cardinal points, West to East, North to South. It is impossible to see the potholes from up there, to decipher the bad drives from the points of light that dance along the roadways.

It’s lovely to leave Trinidad in the day, to see the virescent hills. The clouds look like whipped egg whites. After all these years my imagination still runs wild at the possibilities they seemingly offer. Every child has looked up at the sky and wondered what it would be like to sleep on the clouds. As an adult I still wonder. Surely it must be the most blissful of sleeps, with the sun shining gently down upon one. I wonder what they taste like. They look for all the world like giant cotton candy, but I imagine that they taste sharp and cool and melt immediately in one’s mouth, like powdered ice.

It is lovely to leave Trinidad in the day but it is far more beautiful at night. The island looks clean and efficient. The land itself is a sumptuous black. The lights from the houses shine like jewels against this black velvet, like topazes and peridots strewn carelessly from a giant’s hand. It seems impossible that things like crime and poverty exist here, that there could be so much darkness in a land that, from above, looks like Divali, like good is triumphing over evil.

From the air, Trinidad doesn’t look like a place one should be leaving at all. Rather, it looks like a place one should be returning to, the well deserved reward that awaits at the end of one’s travels. From the air, Trinidad seems like home.

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