Copenhagen to Doha. The flight departs at 11:55pm, which is late enough that the airport has already begun its nightly transformation — the shops shuttered, the announcements thinning, the terminal emptying into that hollow, fluorescent quiet that only airports achieve. The few people still here have the look of travellers caught between intentions: too late to go home, too early to be anywhere else.
I have taken this flight, or variations of it, more times than I can count. CPH–DOH, then onward. BOM–LHR via the Gulf. The occasional BOM–SIN direct, which is the civilised version — short enough to feel manageable, long enough to achieve the particular suspended state that is the red-eye's only gift. These are notes from that state. Not a travel essay. Just observations from the space between departure and arrival, written in the dark, at altitude, when the normal rules of thinking do not quite apply.
The First Hour
Everyone performs the ritual of settling in. The overhead bin negotiation — the quiet territorial conflict over cubic centimetres of space, conducted with aggressive politeness. The seat belt, the tray table, the small adjustments to the headrest that never achieve comfort but signal intent. The pre-departure announcements that nobody listens to, delivered by a crew that knows nobody is listening but is contractually obligated to speak anyway.
Then the meal. The red-eye meal is a strange social contract. It arrives at a time when no sane person would choose to eat — midnight, or one in the morning, depending on how generously you have adjusted your watch. It is almost never good food. But everybody eats it, because the meal is not really about nutrition. It is about ritual. It is the last structured activity before the cabin goes dark, and people cling to structure when they are about to be suspended in a metal tube over an ocean for seven hours.
I eat the meal. I always eat the meal. I have opinions about which airlines do the best midnight chicken, and I am not proud of this, but I am honest about it. The chicken is always dry. The roll is always dense. The butter is always in a foil packet that requires more fine motor skill than anyone possesses at this hour. I eat all of it.
The Middle of the Night
The lights go down and the cabin transforms. During the day, a plane is a transportation system — functional, bright, annoying. At night, it becomes something else. The blue glow of seatback screens. The occasional reading light, a small warm cone in the darkness. The sound — not silence, never silence, but the particular low hum of engines and pressurised air that becomes, after thirty minutes, indistinguishable from the sound of your own blood in your ears.
This is the hour for half-thoughts. Not complete ideas — those require a level of cognitive function that the red-eye has stripped away — but fragments. Associations. The kind of thinking that happens in the borderland between waking and sleeping, where connections form that would never survive daylight scrutiny but feel, at the time, profound.
I once had the clearest idea of my professional life at two in the morning somewhere over Turkey. A product concept that had been refusing to coalesce for weeks suddenly clicked into focus with the simplicity of something that had been obvious all along. I wrote it on a napkin in handwriting so bad I could barely read it the next day. But the idea held. We shipped it four months later.
I have also, at the same hour, been absolutely convinced that I should quit technology and open a bookshop in Goa. This idea did not hold. The red-eye gives and the red-eye takes away.
The People
The businessman in 4A has done this a thousand times. You can tell because his routine is frictionless — shoes off, eye mask on, noise-cancelling headphones activated, asleep before the seatbelt sign goes off. He will wake up exactly forty minutes before landing, shave in the lavatory, and walk off the plane looking like he slept in a bed. I resent him and aspire to be him in equal measure.
The family across the aisle is on their way to their first international holiday. The mother has packed enough food for a siege. The father keeps checking the flight tracker on the seatback screen with the intensity of a man monitoring a stock portfolio. The daughter — seven, maybe eight — is too excited to sleep and has spent the last hour drawing in a notebook with the reading light on, occasionally pressing her face against the window to see if there is anything to see. There is not. She checks anyway, every ten minutes, with undefeated optimism.
The old man in the window seat of my row has not moved since boarding. He is wearing a wool blazer over a kurta, which is a sartorial choice that suggests he belongs to a generation that treated air travel as a formal occasion. He has a book but he is not reading it. He is looking at the dark window with an expression I cannot decode — it might be contentment, it might be grief, it might be the pure emptiness of a mind that has stopped reaching for the next thought. He is the most interesting person on this aircraft, and I will never know his story.
The Window
At some point in the middle of the night, when you are between continents and the cabin is dark and still, you look out the window and see the lights of a city below. You do not know which city. It is a grid of amber and white, impossibly far down, and it is living its regular Wednesday while you pass over it at six hundred miles an hour, going somewhere else.
There is a specific kind of vertigo in this — not the physical kind, but existential. All those lights are lives. Dinners being cooked, arguments being had, children being put to bed, televisions illuminating living rooms, someone sitting at a kitchen table staring at nothing, someone else running through a park, everyone entirely absorbed in the reality of their own ground-level existence while you drift overhead like a thought they will never have.
And then the city is gone and there is only darkness again. Water, probably. Or desert. Or clouds lit from above by a moon you cannot see from this angle. The window becomes a mirror and you see your own face, ghostly, translucent, superimposed on the black. You look tired. You look like everyone looks on a red-eye — slightly older, slightly more honest, slightly closer to whatever you are underneath the daytime performance.
The sunrise, when it comes, comes too fast. You are flying southeast, toward it, and the horizon goes from black to purple to orange in what feels like minutes. It is deeply beautiful and you are too tired to appreciate it properly. This is the red-eye's final lesson: it gives you things at the wrong time, when you are least equipped to receive them. The midnight idea that might be genius. The sunrise you are too exhausted to watch. The strange, specific tenderness you feel for a cabin full of sleeping strangers you will never see again.
Landing
Arriving somewhere at 6am, in yesterday's clothes, with red-eye eyes and a mouth that tastes like airline coffee and recycled air. The world outside the airport has a quality of unreality to it — too bright, too cold, too full of people who slept in beds and woke up on schedule. You are not quite part of their day yet. You are still in transit, even after you have arrived.
The immigration officer asks how long you are staying and you say the number but your voice sounds wrong, like a recording of yourself played back at the wrong speed. You collect your bag. You find a taxi. The driver says something cheerful and you nod as if you understood.
By the time you reach the hotel, the red-eye is already receding. The half-thoughts are losing their glow. The sleeping strangers are becoming abstract. The sunrise you could not stay awake for is just a fact about the rotation of the earth. You shower, you change, you drink a cup of actual coffee, and you become the daytime version of yourself again — functional, oriented, firmly on the ground.
But for a few hours, in the dark, at altitude, you were something else. I am never sure what to call it. Just: awake in a way that is different from the way you are awake during the day. More porous. Less defended. Thinking the thoughts that only come when you are between places, between times, between the person who boarded and the person who will land.