“Taking pictures with a 1.2 lens gives you more artistic choices at night.”

The cabin pressure rises when she sits beside me. There is no way I can go back to reading even though I immediately plant my eyes back to the page, pretending. Did I see correctly? Was she as beautiful as I remember? I force my peripheral vision as much as I can but all I can see is her Coach bag and her H&M sweater. She is fidgeting. She is looking for an opening. I don’t remember how, but soon we are in conversation. Why is she smiling so much? After snack service all the other conversations around us have petered out. People are sleeping. Some are reading with their overhead lights on, clinging to consciousness like we are. I’m telling you, I would have never dared under normal circumstances but… Maybe it’s the night flight thing or the alcohol at high altitude or this half empty plane with it’s meditative engine drone, but the pressure I feel in my stomach and my sudden shortness of breath indicate that I am either going to explode into smithereens like “the fat guy who accepts the after dinner mint” in Monty Python’s ‘The Meaning Of Life’… or kiss her. I choose the kiss and it is amazing. The kind of kiss you wish you could buy as candy. After a three course meal of lips and saliva, no extra words are needed and she puts her head on my shoulder and her hand around my arm and lets her body sink into mine. It is instant romance. It feels so… comfortable. We are an hour away from our initial descent. I wonder if she is sleeping. I don’t want to move a muscle. I don’t even want to breathe. I want to quiet my heart which is pounding so loudly I can feel the echoes in my temples. And as human nature would have it, now that I have everything and the moment is perfect, I immediately start to worry about losing it. Thankfully the stewardess interrupts my inner dialogue to ask me if I want another Canada Dry from the Canadian stash (Canadians don’t use high fructose corn syrup, it’s illegal)? I say yes and with ice. Of course the ice melts right away, diluting my ginger ale without even making it cold. I drink it anyways. The melted ice feels like a metaphor. I will be in Maimi soon and my driver will be picking me up. I’ll have all the best intentions when I tell this beautiful girl leaning on me right now that I’ll be “in touch later” and “lets make plans tonight”. But you know Miami… After meeting two new drunk girls in the lobby with short glittery dresses that are staying on the same floor as me, and flirting with the bartender with the heavy pour that texts using emoticons (she is getting off at 2 am), and hanging out in the VIP action behind the DJ booth at Mansion, and drinking enough Patron shots to enable me to enjoy Mainroom House, and obliging the loud girl in the taxi playfully urging me to “Feel, they’re real…”, and admiring that naked “not so shy anymore” “friend of a friend” spelling my name in the bathroom shower condensation just after noticing her brown panties on the ground looking a lot like a rattlesnake’s shedded skin (instagrammed immediately), and then greeting Ryan coming out from under the sheets to order hot water from room service so that he can have a cup of my Rooibus Green tea while his girl is still sleeping… Yeah somewhere within all of that, the fear of losing “my airplane moment” will be replaced by a feeling of freedom and a re-reading of my in-flight romance as the good omen it actually is. Yeah, you know Miami… Miami is intimacy without commitment, heat without warmth and the temporary loss of feeling on your tongue.

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