I had been waiting for this trip for nearly a year. My parents lived far enough away that visits required planning, saving, and the kind of coordination that always seemed to get pushed to next month and then the month after that, until suddenly eleven months had passed and I was buying a ticket with the slightly guilty urgency of someone who has let too much time go. The flight was just under five hours.
I had a window seat, a neck pillow I had finally remembered to pack, and no particular ambitions for the journey except to close my eyes somewhere over the middle of the country and wake up closer to home. I had barely settled in when I noticed the smell. At first I dismissed it.
Airplane cabins carry all kinds of ambient odors, the recycled air, the galley heating something, the general compressed humanity of a hundred people in a sealed tube. I adjusted in my seat and looked out the window at the tarmac and told myself it would pass. It did not pass.
It got worse. I looked down. There was a foot on my armrest.
Bare, unwashed, positioned with the casual confidence of someone who had decided the armrest was simply an extension of their personal space. The smell was coming directly from it, strong enough that I found myself breathing through my mouth without having made a conscious decision to do so. I turned around.
The young man in the seat behind me was sprawled with his eyes half-closed, headphones on, radiating the particular ease of someone who has never once considered that his comfort might be creating a problem for anyone else. He looked to be in his mid-twenties. He looked completely at home.
Around us, a few passengers had already begun to notice. I saw a woman two rows up wrinkle her nose. The man across the aisle from me glanced down at the foot, then up at me, with an expression of sympathetic recognition.
I kept my voice level. “Excuse me. Could you please remove your foot?”
He pulled one side of the headphones away from his ear and looked at me with the delayed attention of someone who has been interrupted during something they consider more important.
“No,” he said. “It’s comfortable.”
I tried again. “That’s my armrest.”
He shrugged with the economy of someone who has considered the situation and found it beneath further engagement.
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