CNF: To the Flight Attendant Who Loves Their Job
by Emily Brisse
When you were young—seven or eight—you lingered in front of the bathroom mirror switching between different poses: surprise looks like this; amusement looks like this; pleasure is a pursing of the lips, the laugh going inward and down, zinging. At first, you did this with the bathroom door open. Before long, you learned to always close it, to mime. And then: middle school, its odorous pubescence, the locker rooms, its myriad daily small and large tortures. Or—maybe not. Maybe, by that time, you’d learned the power of owning your pleasure, and you knew a mirror as another necessary chance for you to smile at yourself. “Hey there,” you said, out loud. “Today’s going to be a good day—it’s going to be superb.” Later, you found yourself needing something harder to define. It wasn’t money, but needing money was an easy answer, so you got a job—a string of them—and smiled behind Target checkout counters, at the family ordering cheeseburgers at the neighborhood Burger King, at the teenage girls trying out different shades of lipstick at Sephora. “That shade looks superb on you.” (Which it did: a nice rose gold complements almost every skin tone.). But the best has been this job, these hours you spend 32,000 feet in the air, the highest stage, in which you clip seatbelt buckles together with a flourish, in which you motion “left” and “right” and “down” and “no smoking, please” with gestures as smooth and heartfelt as the most gifted dancers. You walk back and forth between your two sections of this airplane with gravity and responsibility and joy in meaningful labor. There are many here who don’t see you. But that’s okay. You understand now. It is less about the mirror (though you still grin into them—why not? Your smile is superb.) and more about the good work of being you.
Emily Brisse’s essays have appeared in publications including the Washington Post, The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction’s True Story, Parents, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and River Teeth. A graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, she is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, a Curt Johnson Prose Award finalist, and a recipient of a Minnesota Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. She teaches high school English just outside Minneapolis, and writes about presence and positivity (not the toxic kind) on Instagram at @emilybrisse.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “To the Flight Attendant Who Loves Their Job”? What can I say? This essay is a love letter to a person with whom I shared recycled air for a mere three hours and will never see again. They brought me delight, appreciation, a packet of pretzels and a tomato juice. If they hadn’t been so committed to their work, I might have waved them over, asked them to tell me the secret of their joy, and then extended a probably-awkward thanks. Instead, I took out my battered blue notebook and imagined, so I wouldn’t forget.
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