34,000 feet above sea level

by Elvis Kibet (Kenya)

A leap into the unknown Kenya

They say life is better at 34,000 feet above sea level, but there is something they didn’t tell you that flying is messy. It’s like a baby eating its first meal or ordering a burger on a first date, because you have to open your mouth so wide that your date can see your epiglottis which you would be showing a lot too soon. Flying is messy because they didn’t tell you that you would never know who would sit next to you; it’s not like a church you could either move two seats in front or choose your sitting position (for use who like choose seats next to the window).In a plane you can seat to someone who drinks throughout, this means you have to stand up each time he has to go and empty his bladder. Or (the worst), a person who hogs the armrest. Or a man who wants to hold your hand during take-off. Or an attractive woman who makes no sign, at all, of having acknowledged your presence as a living thing. Or someone who wants to talk and not stop until you either nod off or you start bleeding in the ears. If you are careless, like I am, you also have to know where your passport is at all times. And you have to remember to disembark with your Kindle, the loss of which, in my opinion, is almost as bad as losing your passport. This was my first time on an airplane. I was buzzling with excitement. Food doesn’t taste good at 34,000 feet because your taste buds change at that altitude. I sleep fitfully during flights and during those intermittent periods. Flights are messy because you can never look out the window at passing trees and the landscape or wave back at a naked child holding a cob of roasted maize or stop to pee on a shrub and connect with mother earth. I also hate being confined in one space for more than an hour, knowing that I can’t leave until someone says on an intercom that I am ready to disembark. So what was it like to be in a 15-hour non-stop flight to New York? The beginning was great. There was a buzz. It felt like we were the chosen ones and we were going to heaven. It really did. It felt like all our sins were forgiven, every last one of them, everything we said on Twitter that the Lord wasn’t pleased with was forgiven and once we landed we would start afresh by avoiding apples. There had been traditional drummers and women dancing at the boarding gate to send us off to Kingdom Come. I had a window seat in economy towards the very end of the plane but then I looked at the middle second last row and saw it was empty so I changed seats because I planned to turn the two remaining seats into by own Business Class and stretch my legs out. That is until some Indian guy joined me and I was so pissed I wanted to pull the hair off his arms one by one. I had run the Stanchart half-marathon that morning and had planned to sleep through the flight. Nonetheless, there was great feeling of bonhomie in the plane. A rising hubbub of chatter and laughter as people looked at the gift hampers and fiddled with the in-flight entertainment and removed their shoes and drank juice. Fifteen hours is a long time. In 15 hours people make friends. In 15 hours you are confined in the same space with these other people you start feeling like you are related. You start feeling like you are a family because you are all suspended above the earth’s surface. In 15 hours it doesn’t matter if you are Luo or Kikuyu or Kalenjin , you are people in a plane. You think a lot in 15 hours. You finish books in 15 hours. In 15 hours you can start a relationship, have one fight and even decide you are going to get married. There are relationships that don’t last the time it takes the KQ flight to get to New York.