Up in the air - Extended boat scene.

- Back home I don't get to act the way I do with you
- That's why I don't have a back home
- I know. You're so cool... Mr. Empty Backpack
- You know about my backpack?
- I googled you.
- You did?
- It's what us modern girls do when we have a crush.
- Did it bother you?
- It depends... Is the bag empty because you hate people or because they hate the bagage that they come along with?
- I don't hate people, I'm not exactly a hermit.
- You just don't want to be tied up with the whole responsibility thing?
- I don't think that's it. (pause) The first time I flew I was 16.
- You're not gonna answer my question? You're just gonna tell me a story?
- Yeah... It was January and I'd just gotten my driver's license... and the lake had frozen over, so we all piled in the car and we went down to the ice to do donuts. All of a sudden, we hit a soft spot and the hood of my car tilted up, and we were sliding backwards into the water.
- Oh. Jesus!
- Yeah, we were literally... I was literally drowning. Within a few seconds I black out. When I wake up, I'm in the sky. I'm in a helicopter, I'm on a stretcher, and there's a guy in a uniform that's telling me that I was just a few minutes away from dying.
- Oh, my God!
- Right? So we're hovering over the hospital and I sit up, and from there I could see the whole western horizon. We'd been flying for 20 minutes... Twenty minutes... to see a city that I thought of as remote, halfway across the state. You know, a foreign capital.
My parents taught me that we lived in the best place on Earth, but now I could see that the world was just one big place, and comparing it didn't make much sense. And I remember thinking to myself: "Don't tell me that this isn't an age of miracles... and don't tell me that we can't be everywhere at once."
I don't know what originally sparked the backpack... Probably needed to be alone.
Recently I've been thinking I needed to empty the backpack before I knew what to put back in it.