Dad and I took a 6:00 a.m. flight from Boston to San Francisco. Our seats weren’t together because he’d bought the tickets last minute, but I was relieved to be alone. I got a window way in the back, only a few rows up from the toilets.

As soon as the plane took off, I reclined my seat and stuffed the tiny airplane pillow against the edge of the window, trying to make myself comfortable enough to sleep. The plane smelled like bathroom cleaner and somebody’s egg-and-cheese bagel. The constant hum of recycled air seemed to press against me, pushing me deeper into the hard plastic window shade. I began to imagine my body passing through it, envisioning my skin and bones as individual cells and then singular atoms and then only photons—energy itself. And each photon, each tiny particle of light, could be instantly inside the wall of the airplane and simultaneously beyond it. My whole body could be suddenly outside, thirty thousand feet above the earth’s surface. I imagined the whirling air around me, nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor in the clouds and in me, the dawning sunlight scattered by microscopic particles of water and the atoms of my body.

I slept in that unsettled way I often do on planes, half dreaming, half awake. I still remember one of those dreams. It has stayed with me my entire life. I’m in the woods; the trees seem too tall to be real. I look up and up and can’t see their tops, only their feathery, dark green needles draping down and down. My grandmother is there, wearing a smock splashed in gold and blue and green. She holds a brush loaded with fuchsia paint and begins to sweep it across her torso, as if she is her own canvas. She notices that I’m standing nearby and raises her eyes to look at me.

She says: Don’t worry, something will happen.

And then I’m on a beach, and someone is handing me a shell. Pink and white, coiled tight.

I say: Is this something?

The airplane shuddered and I jolted awake, and the captain came over the speaker and said, “We’ve reached some expected turbulence over the Rockies, so I’ve turned on the fasten seat belt sign. Please return to your seats.”

The pillow slid down from the window. A bright white line shone from the bottom of the shade, and I inched it up, wincing against the sunlight. When my eyes adjusted, I looked out and down, and far below me the Rocky Mountains looked the way they do on topographical maps: wrinkled blue and brown, unreal.

If only, I thought. If only this wasn’t real.

—