I fidgeted with the crumpled candy wrapper in my pocket as the seatbelt sign lit up next to a monitor. “Estimated 15 hours from Indira Gandhi Airport, Delhi, India to John F. Kennedy Airport, New York.” Bouncing my foot lightly on the floor, I tilted my head to look at the large, muscular man sitting next to me. Running along his exposed bicep was a trail of faded, precisely parallel scars. Down on his lap, I noticed his phone case––a collection tattered with Polaroids of him dressed in a military uniform. Hues of crimson and black coated the torn edges of the photos. Some of the Polaroids’ captions read, “Afghanistan, 2012,” and some indecipherable writing on the others read “Iraq,” from what I could discern. I reconsidered accepting the offer from the flight attendant to sit here because of the extra leg room. Wilson, the only white man on the flight, withheld a chuckle and stared down at me. “Come on sport, ya’ think you the first to gimme those looks? Look, I’ve been in the war and all, but that don’t make me a dangerous fellow!” I thought I had done my best to be subtle. I cleared my throat. “Uh, no sir, that’s not the case at all!” I said shakily. I thought he was playing around with me, but Wilson’s six-foot stature and demeaning build forced me to think otherwise. I struggled to keep the pace of the conversation going for the next couple of hours, but the retired veteran just wouldn’t stop talking. I couldn’t find a way to tell him, “I am going to
sleep now,” nor could I talk about any experiences of enemies shooting at my base in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, speaking to a stranger to pass the time trumped a few minutes of turbulent sleep. After observing everything from the stains on the tray table in front of me to the half-eaten bag of potato chips under my seat, I realized that I had never asked Wilson why he had come to India. “Oh by the way, I forgot to ask. Are you here on a business trip?” I interrupted him. “Yes, as a matter of fact I am,” he started. “I had so much PTSD from Afghanistan that I fought hard to find a job where I could travel and talk to as many people as I could. I am a marketing manager.” That explained it. As my mom would say, he was the type of guy to sell a comb to a bald man. I was shocked that there could be a person as energetic as that man, in his late forties, on a fifteen-hour flight. When I asked him about his marketing venture, he told me that the stories he got to hear from others were the only thing stopping him every night from “inhaling a bullet” from his cold handgun. I stopped for a moment and looked over at his rather wrinkled face. A chill ran down my spine. It seemed as if he let out a small sigh of relief. Had he gotten it off his chest? But why did he confide in me, a random stranger, with such a sensitive topic? My mind raced with questions I didn’t know the answers to. I was scared. I was scared to ask him what he actually meant. But at the same time, I was happy. I was happy that he was there. I was happy that he trusted me. I remembered when the plane landed, he looked back at me as I was exiting the gate. With a soft smile, he said, “Hey sport, remember one thing. Always listen to what they gotta tell you. You never know what can change your life.” Several days of jet-lag later, I thought about his story. I was initially annoyed at Wilson’s
non-stop desire to talk to me. Yet soon, I recognized that I was a person in whom he found solace. I thought I grasped what he was trying to tell me. Sometimes I think back to myself and wonder: we never know what conversations, even 35,000 feet in the sky, can have an impact on us. The hardest conversations are the ones we desperately need to have––the ones that leave us with scars in our minds.