Perpetual Motion

It was a most remarkable phone call!

The pleasant young woman next to us, between flights in Denver, held a long, animated, conversation with herself. It had to have been with herself: she never stopped talking long enough for anyone else to have said anything.

She laughed. She gestured, corrected herself, and went into great detail, endless detail, fascinating detail.

She did not need replies to prompt her, so I tried to imaging what she might be talking about, endlessly, without pause, without hesitation. Maybe, I thought, she is describing every detail of every meal she has eaten since October. Maybe she had a job interview as a tour guide for a ferris wheel, and is telling her mother just how it went.

She was asian, and an asian man eventually arrived and sat at her right. He was occupied with carefully and precisely demolishing the largest sandwich I have ever seen. He brutally tore it into halves before he set about on his mission to avoid starvation in 2012.

It was not evident whether they were together, or not. Only their similarities in age, and my foolish assumptions about race might have made it seem so. When she finally stood up, without missing a word, and walked away, and his subsequent peer in her direction suggested anything, but what it suggested might have been only that she was very attractive, and he knew that.

"Wouldn't it be awful if they allowed cell phone usage on the planes?", Mari asked. "Imagine two hours of people talking to themselves, non-stop!"

I don't know whether she boarded our flight. Just as I had not understood a word of what she said in what sounded to my tenderized ears like an asian language, I never actually saw either her or the sandwich king get on a plane. The only clue I had, again, was what seemed to be a shimmering vibration of the roof of the concourse as we flew by on take-off, but that could have been just an earthquake caused by fracking for natural gas.

Comments

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