In The Air

There was a time when I knew more than I do now. Then, I knew for certain that the passage of time was tied undoubtedly to the progress of knowledge. That the tick of the clock was the sound of synapses linking together in our brain, or, in today’s age, that of bits and bytes being recorded. It was a law, with its requisite graph, where the Xs were linked inseparably to the Ys, and as time sped forward, so did knowledge. Breathless, possibly, but it would have kept up.

- Daniel Yeo

That particular time, I am sure, everyone would have known, before, at least once. Time and knowledge are also universal. Or maybe one is universal, and the other only seems so. I do not know for certain anymore. I do not know as much as I did before. Just as I do not know when was the last time I was on a plane. Or more specifically, when was the last time I was on a plane alone.

What I know now, as I look around me, is that as a rule, one is not allowed to fly alone. In front of me, in the row uncomfortably close to mine, a man and a woman are sitting, together. I know they are together, because they are distant in a way that strangers cannot be. They are not fiddling with their seatbelts, looking for the button that reclines the seat, or riffling through the inflight magazines. They are just being together, separately.

Perhaps they are looking at the couple in front of them. Like I am looking at the separate man and woman right in front of me. Through the empty gap between their seats, I see the couple, their hands clasped together, their heads leaning against each other. The separate man and woman are thinking of another time, another place, when they were that couple, and other men and women looked at them. They are deciding certain things, while I am deciding whether I should envy them still.