Never having met anyone worth meeting on the shuttle or the Metroliner but forever wishing I would and forever feeling like a failure for having not (the stories of “women like me” meeting great eligible men while traveling the Northeast Corridor abounded and were legendary. They were also all complete hearsay: I knew no one directly who had achieved this goal. It was always someone who knew someone who knew someone who had met someone. . . .), I assumed the self-defeating posture and demeanor of aggressive disinterest upon boarding the aircraft: sunglasses, completely unnecessary, still on; short black wool peacoat still buttoned beneath Burberry scarf still wrapped; reading material (the New York Observer, the New York Times, the New York Post—having lived in Washington only a year I still, obviously, had separation and identification “issues” with the city I no longer officially called home) at the ready, up against my chest like a shield.

I was coming back from a meeting with my friend Anne, the managing editor of a big commercial book publisher who threw me as much freelance editing work as she could. I had just finished working on Self-Discovery Through Pain and was set to pick up A Gentle Plea for Me: How to Ask for What You Need (Say Please!). Needless to say, I felt entitled to a day trip to New York (a little lunch; a little shopping; a gigantic gossip fest with Anne) to offset the journey into self-discovery and self-hatred my excruciatingly painful work was forcing me to make.

As usual on weekday afternoons before five o’clock, the plane was only moderately crowded, so I still had my pick of seats. Fearing death from sitting too close to the front of the plane, too far back in the plane, anywhere near either of the wings, or anywhere in between, I placed half a Xanax on the back of my tongue and swallowed it down with a quick swig of bottled water as I passed behind the cockpit, never breaking stride as I moved down the aisle, waiting for the right seat to make itself known to me. We found each other, finally, my seat and I, some rows down, between the wing and the backmost part of the cabin: row twenty-eight; left; window. I wasn’t certain that in the event of an emergency it would be the seat which would save my life: all I knew was that it wasn’t exuding a positive death vibe.

In minutes after I had settled in (coat off, scarf draped across my lap, bag stowed beneath the middle seat in front of me, New York Observer unfolded, Xanax coursing nicely through my veins) the plane began to fill up. It was 2:45 p.m.—fifteen minutes before our scheduled departure—when an extremely tall man began making his way down the aisle. He ducked the cabin’s low ceiling as best he could but failed miserably—slouching, twisting himself this way and that—and as he did I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off of him: not for any lustful or lascivious reasons, but because he was making such a spectacle of himself and causing such a scene.