27-A (Behind the Wing)

The noise just fell away

My dearest incurable humanist,

I'm writing to you from seat 27-A on a flight from Miami to New York. As I settled into my window seat behind the wing, a song began playing in my mind: Liz Phair's Stratford-on-Guy from her debut album Exile in Guyville (1993). The coincidence struck me immediately. Phair sings about being in seat 27-D behind the wing on a flight into Chicago, and here I am, decades later, in my own version of that moment.

Exile in Guyville has been my refuge for years. While many know Liz Phair from her later pop hits like Why Can't I (yes, the one from 13 Going on 30), this raw, honest debut album remains her masterpiece. Stratford-on-Guy might not be the most celebrated track on the record, but it has always stayed with me—the way all the best songs do, lodging themselves somewhere deep and surfacing at exactly the right moments.

As I sit here watching the landscape unfold below, I'm struck by how Phair captures something essential about travel, about perspective, about the strange intimacy of being suspended between places. She sings:

"I was flying into Chicago at night
Watching the lake turn the sky into blue-green smoke
The sun was setting to the left of the plane
And the cabin was filled with an unearthly glow
In 27-D, I was behind the wing
Watching landscape roll out like credits on a screen"

And then, painting the view from above:

"The earth looked like it was lit from within
Like a poorly assembled electrical ball
As we moved out of the farmlands into the grid
The plan of a city was all that you saw
And all of these people sitting totally still
As the ground raced beneath them, thirty-thousand feet down"

For most of my life, I dreamed of living in New York. Every trip anywhere else was shadowed by longing for the city, and every visit to Manhattan was tinged with melancholy, knowing I'd eventually have to leave. The dream felt so distant and impossible that it took on an almost mythical quality.

Now, as this plane takes me back to Manhattan—my home—I still can't quite believe it. It remains a pinch-me moment. I worked incredibly hard to build this life. The late nights, the risks taken, the moments of doubt when I wasn't sure if any of it would pay off, none of it was accidental. Every opportunity seized, every door I knocked, every time I bet on myself when no one else would.

This weekend, I made a conscious decision to be present. I barely touched my phone except for practical necessities, checking addresses, that sort of thing. Instead, I was fully there with my husband and our friends, letting myself sink into the moment without the constant pull of digital distraction. There's something Phair captures perfectly in these lines:

"It took an hour, maybe a day
But once I really listened the noise just fell away"

We live surrounded by so much stimulation that we rarely pause to appreciate what's actually in front of us.

But presence isn't always easy. Yesterday was Father's Day, and it hit harder than I expected. Grief is such a strange companion unpredictable and persistent. One day you're fine, the next a single moment or memory can unravel you completely. This has been a year of changes, ups and downs, and uncertainties that leave me longing for the one person whose advice I trusted most: my dad. The questions pile up, and the person who would have had the best answers isn't here to offer them.

As I type this, the sun is setting to my left, just like in the song. The flight attendant has just offered me a drink, and I'm playing Stratford-on-Guy on repeat, thinking about these cinematic lines:

"And I was pretending that I was in
A Galaxie 500 video
The stewardess came back and checked on my drink
In the last strings of sunlight, a Brigitte Bardot
'Cause I had on my headphones along with those eyes
That you get when your circumstance is movie-sized"

Maybe that's what this moment is movie-sized. The kind of scene where the camera pulls back and you see the character suspended between one chapter and the next, with credits rolling but not quite ending. I hope this is the beginning of something better, not just an interlude between difficulties.

From up here, everything looks different. The problems that loom large on the ground shrink to manageable proportions. The cities become patterns of light, and the highways become lines of intention connecting one place to another. There's something comforting about this perspective how it reminds you that you're a part of something larger, that your small concerns exist within a vast, beautiful, complicated world.

I don't have neat conclusions today, just scattered thoughts from 30,000 feet. Sometimes that's enough to notice the coincidences, to honor the grief, to appreciate the unlikely gift of finding yourself exactly where you once dreamed of being, even when the path there was nothing like what you imagined.

The plane is beginning its descent now. Through my window, the Manhattan skyline emerges from the darkness like a constellation of possibilities those towers holding millions of stories, dreams deferred and realized, heartbreaks and triumphs layered like sediment in the city's foundation. LaGuardia's approach at night never fails to take my breath away; the city spreads out below like a living organism, pulsing with the kind of energy that can crush you and lift you in the same breath. New York is relentless and unforgiving, yes, but I wouldn't change a thing about calling it home. There's something about returning to this view after being away, the way the lights seem to whisper of new beginnings, of chances yet to be taken, of stories still waiting to be written.

P.S. No audio recording today—American Airlines doesn’t seem to endorse mid-air Substack readings (yet).

P.P.S. If you haven’t revisited Liz Phair in a while, start with her 2019 memoir Horror Stories—a look at emotional truths, small indignities, and traumas. Then move on to her 2021 album Soberish, which earns its place in her catalog with the same raw sharpness and disarming honesty that made Exile in Guyville timeless.