migratory patterns of birds
jessica hertz
She had grown used to the middle seat. He needed the window—needed to lean against the plastic wall of the plane, needed to open and close the shade at will, needed to press his forehead against the cool pane when he got overheated. She felt it was an equal trade since she needed things too: to rest her head on his shoulder, to feel the reassuring weight of his hand on her knee during take-off, to share his earbuds as she drifted off to sleep.
But now, on this flight, she sits in a window seat. It takes her a moment to adjust to the newness of it. Her knuckles turn white from gripping the armrests as the plane climbs to cruising altitude. She presses her head against the window but it is too cold for her. She closes the shade. She reads. She sleeps. She opens the shade again.
Seven miles down, Greenland stretches out as far as she can see; flat white ice meets cloudless blue sky to the edges of the window and, for a moment, she imagines this is all there is— just empty landscape and possibility. The sunlight reflects across the tundra; it is painfully bright. She is used to looking out the window while leaning across his lap, feeling slightly unbalanced, peeking through the part of the window that he hadn’t claimed. Now she makes herself large. The stranger in the middle seat can see out only where she lets him. She feels greedy and stable and powerful.
The Denmark Strait unfurls below her, and she relaxes back into her seat and allows the plane to shepherd her to her destination—first to Keflavík before continuing east to Egilsstaðir. She thinks of how he said he needed to stay in Los Angeles. He didn’t understand why she would move for two years to a small town in eastern Iceland in order to research bird migration patterns. She hadn’t done field research since graduate school; he didn’t realize she missed it. They failed to find a compromise and so each of them broke the other’s heart as well as their own. She left without him; he stayed without her.
The plane begins its descent. Out the window she spies an Arctic tern in the distance. She imagines it flying over the flat openness of Iceland, tilting from side to side in response to air currents, both wings working in tandem to stay aloft not through perfect equality, but rather with a fair sort of imbalance, each propping up the other by turns, enabling the bird to fly.
She hopes he will change his heart and join her as she had so often joined him, whether he presented at conferences or visited family or simply said “I need you.” She misses resting her head on his shoulder, the weight of his hand on her knee, sharing his earbuds. He can lean across her lap to look out the window if he likes; she knows it won’t unbalance her.
