graphic by kayleigh woltal
Flights make my palms sweat. I have been traveling for years and they still make my palms sweat. I hate how much hassle comes from how many steps there are between deciding I want to go somewhere and actually landing at my destination: flight comparisons, ticket costs, booking through the airline or through cheaper, less-reliable third parties, getting to the airport hours before the flight and every line — passport, security, the gate — where the person at the end can completely upend your trip and you can kiss your flight goodbye before even getting on.
Here I am: window seat on my thirty-somethingth flight ever (I counted). I am on my way to Greece, the first stop of my first ever self-funded, self-planned solo travel. While pictures and movies of Greece elicit calm, dreamy scenes of beaches and the glimmering Mediterranean Sea (ABBA optional though preferred), this trip was less of a vacation and more of a deeply personal mission.
For most of my life, I’ve traveled out of necessity rather than of wanderlust. My family is fragmented across multiple countries. My extended family are all in Poland, while my parents are in my country of birth, the United States. I am my entire family’s first American, heavy is the head. As if this wasn’t enough, I moved to the Netherlands because of reasons. So if I want to spend the holidays with my family instead of being alone in the dark, cold, sober winters that the Dutch know and love to complain about, I am doomed to catching a flight.
Every time I feel even so much as a jostle when I’m 33,000 feet in the air, hurtling through the sky in an aluminum can that I can’t control, I try to remind myself “I did this to myself” to calm me down. It does not work.
I chose this life — and for this trip in particular, a spot in Basic Economy 32F — but in a way, this life chose me first. When I was a kid, my younger brother and I were sent to babcia and dziadziu, my grandparents, for the summer every year up until I started high school. This is a very typical practice for kids of Polish families living in the United States (though weird for everyone else). It’s how the Polish family in America maintains a balance between two diametrically-opposed practices that are both highly valued: building a solid, stable life in the new world hinging on good education and hard work while simultaneously keeping the traditions and language of the culture alive in their children.
For the first few years, we were escorted by family members. The first time my parents took us, but after a week went back home to work. Sometimes after that, my uncle or grandma would visit and then take us with them back to Poland. At one point, we became unaccompanied minors — child passengers traveling without a parent or guardian that were trusted in the hands of the airline crew. We were recognizable from the garish blue and green passport pouch I wore proudly for my brother and me. It functioned as a badge of honor in addition to keeping our passports safe and very much visible at all times. In all the flights I’ve been on throughout my life, I have never seen more kids wearing these passport pouches than I have on flights between Poland and the US. It’s just how it is for Polonia, the Polish diaspora.
It may sound scary for a child to go on a plane trusting a stewardess to take care of you, but for me it was no different from going to school. It was easy for me to trust Teacher Lady since I was four. Why was Plane Lady any different? I was guided from place to place by an older, seasoned air traveler who definitely knew what to do, food and luggage taken care of. All I had to do was behave myself and keep myself occupied for eight hours, which was pretty much what I did in school anyway. If anything were to happen, we knew who to talk to. If anything major happened, it wasn’t my fault. It was a great arrangement. I even got some Prince Polo chocolate bars out of the deal. Try them out sometime.
Then I turned 15.
It was no longer compulsory for me to be an unaccompanied minor, and my parents figured I had been on enough flights to know what to do by then. Training wheels gone. There were no more relatives, no more ugly passport comfort pouch, no more stewardesses who were supposed to give an extra fuck about my spoiled ass specifically. It was me and my boarding ticket versus every authority figure at the end of every line that we had to wait on that didn’t care if I boarded or not. I was constantly worried about fucking up and somehow accidentally canceling the entire trip and going home to very annoyed parents or grandparents. That’s the worst thing that can happen at fifteen. There were still chocolate bars, though.
I traveled to be my family’s Best American Girl. I got to see my loved ones and the countries and cities that made my family who we are now. But my traveling also had a slight political function on a very small and personal scale. My brother and I were the main conduit through which all the family factions spread throughout Polonia — Canada, England, Poland, multiple cities across the US — would maintain relationships and goodwill. There were many relatives that we visited that, respectfully, neither my brother nor I could give less of a fuck about. I’m actually pretty sure the sentiment was mutual with some of them. But my parents gave multiple fucks apiece. These visits were less about the visit itself and more about the symbolic gesture of goodwill between families to maintain interpersonal connections between people separated by distance and lack of paid vacation days. Most families just send Christmas cards and achieve the same thing. We’re special.
We brought gifts from country one to country two, saving some leftover gifts from country two to bring to country three, who would then trade with us gifts from country four, you get the point. About half of them were very tacky paintings of angels. For the gift-givers themselves, they only had to care about sentiment. Weight limits in baggage were very rarely acknowledged. An example: I had only two kg leftover before I hit the maximum weight on my check-in bag and my grandma insisted that I take ten kg of my mom’s favorite candy back home with me. Talk about family baggage. I was not only the one who had to carry the presents back and forth, but I also had to decide how many presents made the cut. I have left behind many tacky paintings of angels in my lifetime.
Enough angels. Enough candy. My restless spirit wanted to travel and really see things I’d never seen before. My mother, the same one who emigrated alone to Brooklyn in the 90s who let me live alone in Manhattan, forbade me from visiting the notoriously dangerous English countryside where my friend was studying for a semester just because I didn’t have anyone on the plane with me. While I hoped for the typical Eurotrip locations like Rome and Paris, my grandparents wanted to take me to Lithuania (which I was still open for), but my parents rejected that for fear of their health while traveling. Even domestic trips within the US outside of my family were points of contention. I couldn’t travel alone (mother), but if I brought on one or more travel companions, then those companions wanted additional companions and then everyone would have their own idea of where we should go and no consensus was ever truly reached. I had freedom, but I had no freedom. I was mercilessly bound to the whims of others and I wanted badly to free myself from what I could only see as bullshit. Moving to the Netherlands was my way out. And then Covid laughed.
But now, here I am on my way to Greece. The only baggage I have with me for the trip is an Osprey backpack (highly recommend, by the way) stowed in the overhead compartment filled with everything I need for the coming trip: basic toiletries and clothing weighing no more than eight kg as per requirement.
My motivation was simple: travel as I wanted on my own terms, which should be simple but for some reason has proven difficult. Based on my friends’ travel photos, I was cognizant of there being more views than the backside of the same cow worth flying for. I love my mother country and I love its cows. But you know what my mother country doesn’t have? Santorini, among other things.
My itinerary was simple. I would go to Greece. There, I would travel alone in Athens for the first two days before meeting with school friends, with whom I would see the west coast: Lefkada up to Corfu. From Corfu I would go to Italy, starting in Venice. Visiting Venice was especially integral, as it was to fulfill a personal vendetta. Since I studied flooding in the Netherlands, Venice was to be the location of a research project about the flooding patterns in the area. The trip was supposed to start on March 15, 2020. Guess what happened.
So I would start Italy in Venice, and I would enjoy the city without being on the clock for school. From there, I would visit more school friends in Bologna and Florence before making my way back up to Milan by way of Cinque Terre. I chose these places because they were supposed to be beautiful. I have dresses packed that I will wear in these cities. Am I doing this for Instagram? A little bit. And what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with wearing beautiful dresses, even impractical, going to beautiful locations and feeling beautiful there? These moments make me love being a woman and being alive.
This whole trip was self-planned, self-financed, self-fulfilling. This was something to be proud of. But now that I was about to hurtle through the sky, alone, after which I would have to get from the airport to my rented room, alone, my mind did what it does best at the worst time:
Am I dressed appropriately?
The plane is going to explode.
Will people stare?
Will I get lost?
I have no family in Greece. Take me to Country with Family, please.
The Greek people will know I’m American. I’m going to be that American. Just shoot me.
Oh God what if I do get shot.
What if something happens to me?
Chiquitita, tell me what’s wrong?
What am I going to do?
I’m going to get kidnapped and sold and then my mother will say “I told you so.”
Good Lord, girl, what have you done to yourself?
Well if I get kidnapped and sold in Greece then at least I’m in Greece!
HOW I LOVE BEING A WOMAN!!!!
My head is exploding and my heart is exploding and there’s nothing I can do about it, yet I sit perfectly still and silent. The plane starts and shakes and jostles and forces me into the sky. I’m there.