For most of my adult life, I have lived more than a thousand kilometres away from my parents. This means that if I want to spend any quality time with my family, I need to shell out hundreds of dollars to sit thigh-to-thigh with a stranger in a joyless metal sky tube for hours and hours on end. 

My parents live Nova Scotia, Canada, and in the fall of 2017, I was living in New York City and attending my first semester of grad school. This meant that, for the first time ever, my journey home was not just going to be a miserable sky-trek – it was going to be a miserable international sky-trek, without the fun of arriving at an exotic destination. I would have to deal with customs, border guards and the ninth circle of hell that is international luggage claims just to drink a Tim Horton’s frozen Iced Capp in -23 C weather. 

Worth it.

Columbia University’s end-of-term final exams go so late into December that Santa Claus himself is likely to get out of Manhattan before you do, and I knew that booking my flight home was going to be especially unpleasant that year. Sure enough, the only flight that I could afford to get on without missing an exam or taking out a second student loan was a LaGuardia-to-Toronto-and-then-sprint-to-catch-a-connection-to-Halifax flight that left at a quarter to midnight on Christmas Eve. I was going to be spending the busiest travel day on the calendar flying one of the busiest travel routes on the entirety of Planet Earth.

Bring it on.

On the day of the flight, everything seemed to be going okay. My Uber driver knew exactly where to drop me off for Toronto departures, and gave off minimal serial killer vibes. I got to the airport with just enough time to hurl my luggage onto the conveyor belt like a 48lb shotput, and no one seemed to care that my “personal item” was basically a second carry-on bag. Even the TSA agents that I dealt with were tolerable towards me, because being a 5’3 chubby white girl in a cartoon animal hat with a Canadian passport puts you somewhere between “high school gymnastics team” and “shih tzu in a carry-on dog purse” in terms of possible terrorist threats. 

I am not a person you look at and think “bombshell”, in any sense of the word.

I got through security, found my gate and presented my boarding pass without any serious mishaps, and I tricked myself into believing that this was going to a normal flight where everything went okay. 

And then I actually set foot on the aircraft, and everything went to shit.

I always choose a window seat when I’m flying at night. I have the steel bladder of a long-haul Alaskan ice road trucker, and I like to spend my flights pensively staring out the window with my headphones on like I’m the protagonist in a bad coming-of-age movie, so a window seat is really the only choice for me. Staring down at the lights of Manhattan on a winter night makes for premium angst, and I made absolutely sure to get my preferred seat booked well in advance. 

So you can imagine my surprise when I arrived at my aisle and found my seat already taken. 

A couple who appeared to be in their early thirties was seated in my row, with the husband in the middle and the wife taking up my precious window seat. I never actually learned their names during any of the horrifying events that unfolded on this flight, so for the purposes of storytelling, I’m going to call them Gunther and Brunhilde. I gently pointed out to Brunhilde that she was in my seat, thinking that she’d simply made a mistake in the stress of boarding one of the worst flights in the history of aviation.

To my surprise, however, she rolled her eyes at me, and told me that she was in the right seat and that I was perhaps not smart enough to read my own boarding pass. I tried to point out that the seats have letters on them, and that matching the letter A on my pass to the letter A on the seat was a skill that I’d definitely mastered, but Gunther waved me off and assured me that it didn’t matter which seat belonged to who, as his wife was not going to be moving. All of the flight attendants on the plane were busy trying to body-slam holiday luggage into the overhead bins, and I decided it would be easier to just fold like a wet pancake and accept my aisle seat. 

My Ivy League sweatshirt wasn’t helping my case, as it merely proves that I’m dumb enough to get a degree that costs more than a new Jeep Wrangler.

In the stress of studying for final exams and packing to go home for the month-long break, I’d forgotten to charge my Bluetooth headphones and I didn’t have a backup cord. Sure enough, a few minutes after the flight took off, I heard the dreaded “please recharge headset” in my ears and my headphones went dead. I kept them on, however, because I was trying to ignore the seat-stealers beside me like the petulant child that I am. 

With no music to listen to and the book I brought turning out to be less interesting than I’d hoped, I found myself casually eavesdropping on the conversation that the couple was having quite loudly beside me. From what I could gather, they were both very well-traveled individuals who often took trips both together and separately with their respective friends. They were reminiscing about the best places that they had been to, and Brunhilde launched into a detailed description of a charming bed and breakfast in the English countryside that she had once spent a few days at.

Without missing a beat, Gunther turned to her and casually asked, “Is that where you were staying when you fucked Greg behind my back?”

I was glad to be in an aisle seat, because that would have been the exact moment that I smashed the plane window and sucked myself out into the abyss. 

Brunhilde went quiet. Gunther went quiet. I went quiet. Someone in the seat in front of us was chuckling along to Cheaper By the Dozen 2, but everyone else went quiet. I was on the verge of flagging down a flight attendant so I could ask to be moved to the cargo hold, when Brunhilde finally spoke up. 

“I thought we’d moved past this,” she said, staring straight ahead. 

“Yeah? Well, maybe I can’t move past it,” he replied. 

“We went to all that counselling.”

“I promised I’d go to counselling. I didn’t promise I’d forgive you.”

It was nearly 1 AM on Christmas morning, and I was trapped on an enormous flying Pringles can, listening to a stranger’s marriage fall apart.

At that moment, one of the flight attendants came by, pushing the drinks cart. I don’t remember what her name was, but she is the greatest person that I have ever met in my entire life and the closest that I will ever come to seeing an angel appear from on high. The flight attendant stopped right next to me, her bright smile never fading for a moment as she crouched down beside me and whispered, “I think you need these,” before pressing two airplane-sized bottles of wine into my hand.

Angels we have heard on high,

Sweetly bringing Chardonnay.

As I started going to town on a 6 oz bottle of table wine, Brunhilde decided to try to make Gunther see reason. 

“Can we just be adults about this and try to have a nice Christmas with my parents?” she pleaded.

“Oh, we’re going to have a lovely Christmas,” he said, “because it’s going to be the last one we ever spend together.”

And then the man I had been sharing an armrest with for nearly an hour calmly turned to his wife and asked her for a divorce. 

The world’s greatest flight attendant palmed me two more miniature bottles of wine as Brunhilde began making sounds like an asthmatic manatee trying to run a half-marathon. All notions of decorum quickly went out the window. Gunther was crying and angrily demanding to know if Greg’s penis was better than his. Brunhilde was crying and begging him not to tell her parents about Greg’s penis. At one point they began angrily making out against the window, and I tried to find out how much airplane wine I needed to drink before I could astral-project to another dimension. 

Possibly making me the only person to spiral into alcoholism over a divorce without knowing either of the people involved

By the time we landed in Toronto, I had enough empty miniature bottles to start my own recycling depot, and my tray table was the only thing capable of remaining upright. Canadian Border Services allowed me back into Canada only because they legally had to, and I somehow flung myself onto a series of moving sidewalks at the Pearson Airport that brought me to the correct gate for my flight to Halifax. 

I learned three important lessons on that flight to Toronto that I still carry with me to this day.

The first is that if I ever trick some poor soul into marrying me, I should probably avoid throwing away my marriage on the penis of a Englishman named Greg. 

The second is that airplane wine isn’t nearly as terrible as I thought it would be, especially once you hit your sixth bottle of it. 

And the third – and most important – is that I will never again leave home without fully charging my headphones. 

Because you never know what you might hear. 

To read more about the awkward encounters I’ve had with strangers, check out my post about the time I watched a woman eat an entire freezer-sized jumbo bag of peanut butter on public transit. 

For more posts about the non-stop mortifying experiences that make up my daily life, but sure to read about the time I met Star Wars actor Anthony Daniels while dressed as an over-sized Ewok. 

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