We are suspended in flight. We are the wingless birds. This elaborate machine of plastic and metal holds us up, and we float, blissfully oblivious of this eighth wonder we’ve assembled in the sky. Here we are, and I look out, past the doublepaned window that serves as my protection from a 30,000-foot fall, past the wing that keeps us up and moving forward, that allows me to sit and steadily write. There are many things that remind us of our size in nature, our self-magnified features reflected back to us on a pinhead, and one of those is flying: looking out over the expanse of ocean, color fading in its unimaginable distance; seeing the mountains stand at attention in all their snow-capped glory. It’s a playful juxtaposition: I am big enough to see tens of miles of cropland at once, I can step over forests in seconds, and while doing that, I am small enough to be but a tiny shadow on the ground. There’s a word in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (the dictionary of words that seem to not have definitions): Sonder. The realization that every person you meet is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, in which you may be just an extra, a car on the highway, the owner of a coffee cup in an overflowing recycling bin, a passerby in an airport terminal– or even no one at all. Airplanes exemplify this simultaneous tinyness and absolute enormity. We have worked with human minds for decades to develop the flying machine, hone it to winged perfection; we’ve used our cranial complexity to find compounds and formulas and algorithms that can create this heavenly body. And yet we are far, far too small to be anything close to heavenly bodies. We are at the whim of the world. On our take off, I was imagining the plane randomly blowing up, just exploding into thousands of fiery pieces. This construct of human creation into smithereens.

I’ve created lives for every person on this flight. Each of them has a history through which they’ve never lived and a fate they don’t even know exists, and it’s all within the echoing halls of my mind. The woman to my left – she has a boyfriend overseas; her earbuds are playing audio recordings of songs he’s written for her on the violin. Sometimes when she stretches and peers quietly out the window, she’s imagining looking down through the shadowed trees of the forest and the leafstrewn pool covers of suburbia, down through the mantle and core of the earth to where he is, where it’s not yet morning, where he too is looking out of his window, down to the dark street below; across the world and just a thought away. The man two seats in front of me and one to the right is going to see his granddaughter for the first time. His daughter married a man she met in college and together they moved halfway across the country. Her baby came in the late evening, and by midnight he was packed and at the airport. His wife had died the year before, and he’s feeling the blessing of this little one with an eager incredulity. Because of the child and the joy she holds, he’s sitting up straighter than he ever has before; he’s trying to sleep so he won’t be exhausted upon arrival but he can’t get his eyes to close. Next to him is the unaccompanied minor, an eight-year-old boy whose light-up Antman shoes are making periodic disco balls of the metal of his seat legs. He grew up in a foster home and is going to live with his great aunt, a cheerful woman previously unknown to CPS. She will soon be the proud caretaker of an energetic eight-year-old, and if she owned a pair, she too would be tapping her light-up sneakers against the floor of her old house as frequently and excitedly as possible.

The stories tend to get more and more outlandish as they go on, until the co-pilot is a circus clown and the woman in front of me in the bathroom line owns a chimpanzee that’s stowed in her carry-on in the overhead bin. Everyone here has a life I’ve built for them. Although most of them probably aren’t true, it’s a simple pleasure to imagine they are, or that at least a tiny part of them are: maybe the girl to my left is listening to violin music, or the daughter of the man in front of me does live halfway across the country. Maybe he is going to visit her! That would be grand– to know that my powers of prediction aren’t just fantasy. And who knows? Maybe they’re all inventing stories about me. That would make for a pleasant conversation:

“So I’ve heard you’re a lion tamer.”

“Your house collapse in the earthquake last month?”

“Are you sure your daughter lives right next-door?”

In any case, it all gets mixed up in airplanes. Us human beings, each the size of a small Redwood sapling, each of us living totally random lives in the grand scope of the world. And still we are so big. Big enough to hold ourselves thousands of feet in the air and have room for air conditioning. Big enough to cross oceans for each other. Big enough to have brains that make fantastical stories for thousands of bodies and keep them alive by choice. We are big enough to fly, and that’s pretty damn special.