Secret Royalty On Tour

There’s a particular kind of humility that comes from being assigned seat 28E.

The middle. The mathematical centre of other people’s discomfort, for thirteen hours, from Los Angeles to Aotearoa.

To my right: a woman whose body had simply outgrown the architecture around it (and the bones buried within it). Her flesh pressed warmly against the armrest between us, the kind of overflow that tells you a body has been at war with itself for a long time. She radiated unhappiness.

I tried not to project. I genuinely tried. Probably really uncomfortable. Probably not what you think it means. I had no idea what had brought her to this particular shape, in this particular seat, on this particular night. Neither did she need me to.

To my left: a man of about seventy. The smell of cigarettes preceded him by about three feet, the particular stank sweetness of someone who’d been smoking on a cruise ship for ten days straight and considered the whole thing a fine idea. He told me this cheerfully. He was the joker card, pulled from somewhere in the middle of the deck.

I dropped a zopi before we’d cleared the gate. Soon it all would be softened.

When I woke, hours later, groggy and grateful, they were both asleep. His breathing was rasping, interrupted, effortful. Hers was shallow, her face pinched even in unconsciousness, as though sleep hadn’t quite convinced her to let go.

And I sat there in the stale, still darkness, the three of us breathing in our different rhythms, and I thought about the whole extraordinary mess of being alive.

The cards you’re dealt. The choices you make with them. The body you end up in. The sliding doors. The middle seats you’re assigned by some algorithm that knows nothing about any of it.

I felt, absurdly and completely, grateful.

Not for the seat. For the fact that I noticed.