You could accuse me of being a bad mother after you read this story. While I do find it funny, I do realize the situation could have gone horribly wrong. Don’t beat me up because I’ve done it enough! I’ve learned my lesson! But now that we are ok – and that it’s more than a year later – I feel like it’s a funny story that I *hope* I’m safe to tell.

Kira and I were on our way to Toronto because my dad was ill. That’s NOT the funny part. Back in Calgary, it was a Wednesday. We had originally booked tickets for the following Sunday. Then we changed that to Friday. Then, last minute, we looked for flights on the same day, Wednesday. The only flights that had two seats was the midnight flight out of Calgary, the red eye. We booked it. It would have us land in Toronto at 6am. Instead of disturbing my sister or my brother-in-law at that ungodly hour, we planned to take a taxi to their place as soon as we landed.

The plan when we got on the plane was to sleep. However, we’d never been successful sleeping on a plane before. Never. Even after 24 hrs of travelling, taking red eyes, crossing time zones. So, I had packed my prescription sleeping pills within easy access in my personal bag. After taking sleeping pills pretty consistently for about 5 years, I had stopped and now only took them sporadically when I needed them, like after staring at the ceiling for two hours on a work night. But I brought them knowing I’d need some help on the flight. I popped two as soon as I boarded. I have NO IDEA why I took two. I normally take a quarter of one. A QUARTER. AND I TOOK TWO. I guess because I figured I’d need that much to do something I’d never done before, which was actually sleep. I had no idea what I was thinking.

Since Kira had been in the hospital, her doctor had prescribed her medication that helped her sleep. Not a sleeping pill per se, but an anti-anxiety pill that had soporific effects, so she took them at night because she also had trouble sleeping. She popped her prescribed dose as well.

Just before I drifted off into Lalaland, I remember that the man beside me in the window seat (Kira had the aisle) was talking to himself. I remember thinking that he was a very strange man. I offered up my garbage bag for his disinfecting wipe, and he practically threw the wipe at me. He wouldn’t make eye contact with the flight attendant and yah, there was that whole talking-to-himself thing. He even answered himself back.

The next thing I knew, Kira was shaking me awake and the flight attendant was announcing that we had landed in Toronto. Wow! Fastest flight ever. I should sleep on planes more often. To my horror, when I opened my eyes, I was looking forward ON AN ANGLE, which meant that, yep, I had been sleeping with my head on strange mans shoulder. As we departed the plane, he smiled shyly at me and said goodbye. Oh dear Lord…

I don’t remember much of what came afterward.

Kira said I walked right past our luggage on the luggage carousel and she had to pull me back. She said that instead of calling a cab to go to my sisters, I called a nearby hotel booked a room. I vaguely remember deciding I’d rather sleep than sit an hour in a taxi. So apparently, we walked 15 minutes from the airport to the hotel, at 6:30am in the morning, in the freezing cold and snow, me carrying a full-sized suitcase, a carry-on and a personal bag, a feat that I couldn’t manage on my own the next day when I was wide awake (I had to get Nalin, my brother-in-law, to help me). I don’t remember checking in to the hotel, I don’t remember anything about getting to the room or getting into bed. I just remember waking up in the morning in the hotel room with Kira beside me and wondering how the heck we’d gotten there. I called my family in the morning and Nalin picked us up.

Kira thought she’d been the one to get through this clear-headed. But in the morning, she woke up to a dozen or so messages from concerned friends wondering if she was ok. Apparently, she’d posted a Snapchat video of herself in the airplane washroom (not on the toilet!), where she was talking gibberish to herself. Her friends had seen it and gotten very concerned. She checked her phone and yep, there was the video. She had no idea what she was thinking when she made it. She then checked her phone to see what else she’d been up to. She’d made a Spotify playlist called “Swials” with no songs on it, and then shared the playlist with several people, who were just as confused as the friends who’d seen the video. To say these friends were concerned was an understatement. Some of them knew she’d left for Toronto. Some of them didn’t, and when they searched for her location and saw that she wasn’t in Calgary anymore, they’d gotten VERY concerned and sent her a ton of messages. They’d been convinced she had been kidnapped!

It’s a funny story that we now can’t tell without laughing. But to think about it, we could have really have been harmed! Kidnapped, sex-trafficked, murdered. Yikes. I don’t want to think about it. Thank goodness that apparently, when I take too many sleeping pills and don’t get enough sleep, I have super-human strength, enough to man-handle a 50-lb suitcase, a 15-lb carry-on and a 10-lb bag through snow and ice in the dark.

When I traveled alone a year later on the same red-eye, Kira made me promise not to take any sleeping pills. 😊