Flights

AIR-SICKNESS BAGS

On a plane from Warsaw to Amsterdam I was playing with a paper bag without realizing it; then I looked and saw it had been written on:

‘10/12/2006: Striking out for Ireland. Final destination Belfast. Students of the Rzeszów Institute of Technology.’

The inscription, in pen, was visible on the bottom of the bag, in the empty space between the official print which repeated the same thing in multiple languages: ‘air-sickness bag… sac pour mal de l’air… Spuckbeutel… bolsa de mareo.’ Between these words some human hand wrote in those other few words with the ‘1’ at the beginning, as though their author hesitated for a moment about whether or not to leave behind this anonymous expression of anxiety. Did they think the inscription on the bag would find a reader? That I would in this way bear witness to someone else’s journey?

I was moved by this one-sided act of communication, and I wondered whose hand had written it, how their eyes had looked as they had guided that hand along the line of pre-printed text. I wondered if it was working out for them there, in Belfast, for those students from Rzeszów. As a matter of fact I wanted on some other plane in the future to find an answer to my question. I wanted them to write: ‘It went fine. We’re going back to Poland now.’ But I know that writing on bags is something people do only out of anxiety and uncertainty. Neither defeat nor the greatest success are conducive to writing.