Between armrest and atmosphere

I write this as I sit perched between armrests inside a giant tin can - a giant tin can with wings. A tin can that is supposed to carry me over the Philippine Sea from Sydney to Shanghai.

The clock on the rectangular screen in front of me reads five hours and eighteen minutes. Time moves thick and heavy in this floating-real-world time capsule. Like the Elmer's glue that I would sink my hands into in my childhood days. Enough minutes and seconds to think about quite literally every minute and second of the past six months.

As we drift apath to the Philippine archipelago Shanghai grows closer, steadily and excruciatingly slow. "Shanghai is not far from Korea" I think, as my gaze glides across the lit up screen.

South Korea, a place that has witnessed me transform into a version of myself which had long been buried underneath piles of rubble and ash, left behind by the cataclysms of my youth.

As I sit squished between two strangers, who, for some reason, are also embarking upon this gum-stretching journey to Shanghai from Oceania on a random Thursday at eleven in the morning, I find myself reminiscing moments which felt so vivid I wish I could download their atmosphere onto a hard drive in my brain to immortalize their still flickering bliss.

Many of these moments on my journey involved me looking up at the moon. Or the sun. Or a bug. And the other half involved people.

Sharing a boiling meal out of one bubbly pot with the family you made in a foreign country. A passerby offering you their umbrella in the rain. Giggling with the guy you met at an art gallery as you leap mid air during a silent disco. Being gifted free food to try as you eat alone in a basement restaurant. Spinning ten times before you throw off a frisbee to the strangers who just turned friends. Running up a mountain trek at 4am with someone you met a week ago. A dwarfish man helping you retrieve your bag charms from within a bench in front of a bookstore you just spent your entire afternoon reading in. Screaming along to "I Want to Know What Love Is" as you and your friends stick your fingers into the piercing airflow outside the Toyota Yaris you just rented for the day. Sharing hands with your newly acquired friend from Japan, your left arm squeamishly flopping behind your head, as you lunge into the paralyzing cold of an Australian waterfall in winter. Helping the friend whom you just made after swimming with whales pull off their wetsuit in the middle of a parking lot. Being pulled in for a saw-dusty group hug in between cracked and chopped trees as ants draw circles on your shoecaps. Laughing until you choke as your new hiking buddy mumbles out of sheer exhaustion. Staring at iridescent jellyfish dancing weightlessly while you hold hands with someone who makes you feel at home in a place that you are not.

I could probably fill ten more pages with moments like these. They collect in my chest like pressed flowers in a herbarium. It's the kind of moments that make you pause months later, overwhelmed with the amount of chest-hollowing beauty you were allowed to experience. How much connection you stumbled into.

Isn't it beautiful how our lives are essentially an endless stack of expansive memories like these? How throughout our - in context - pretty short visit on this blue bulbous sphere we call home, we all build a museum of intricate wonders uniquely our own? It could be the way light falls perfectly on a leaf in the dawn of day or the taste of thick humid evening air as you strut home after having said goodbye to someone who inspired you. Essence that can't be quite captured or shared. Something that thrives in the margins between memory and feeling.

I gently tap on the illuminated plastic in front of me. The time reads four hours and twenty-five minutes.