halfway to my destination in the window seat of an airplane; the businessman in the seat next to me with his red face in his wet hands, the ache in the back of my throat, and the moment where I remember that I hate flying and that 13,000 miles off the ground is a terrible place to be reminded.
the plane jerks and bobs on the turbulence outside, and i focus on the glossy surface of safety cards that will offer no real solution to any problem at all. in the event of a water landing, the safety door to my right will pop loose and a giant orange slide the color of day-glo hunting vests will inflate, the duty of emergency exit escort falling onto my shoulders. in such an event responsibilities will be low, however, because I'll be as dead as the rest of the passengers. the surface tension of the ocean will compact our plane flat, and we'll be a sheet of folded notebook paper laid out across the rolling waves. the explosion didn't kill the astronauts on the Challenger flight so much as their cockpit's freefall drop onto the water below them, so i put the safety card back in the seat pocket and think about something else.
and i'm trying really hard to not think about you, to avoid awarding you the satisfaction of more wasted moments on your behalf. but the businessman in the seat next to me is still crying, like he's been doing since ten minutes after takeoff. buttoned up in his suit, papers laid out on the tray table in front of him, his composure broke and suddenly it was tears and snot and these heavy racking sobs of his that shake my seat with every convulsion of his body. the stewardess is asking him, is he going to be okay, does he need a bottle of water, would he like something to eat, and its clear that what he needs is not ever going to be in the kitchen of this plane. so they leave him there, and i'm looking hard out the window and there's an entire skyline of empty space to fall into. i think how when the oxygen masks drop from overhead, the man next to me won't even care, those masks and his laptop and his expensive leather briefcase just more meaningless objects in the world.
its your fault. me here, him sobbing, the wind slapping this plane around like unwanted garbage. even the plane's fall into a range of mountains somewhere within wyoming would only be the closing statement to your most recent line of arguments. here is a smirking demise for the source of your troubles, scattered in unrecognizable pieces across empty prairies, an exclamation point at the end of another useless sentence. if the crash brought my death i'd want to haunt you, but the concept is beginning to feel redundant. those nature videos where the giant predatory snake waits for the antelope to breathe out so it can tighten its grip, pushing itself inward until there's nowhere left for air to go, that's this moment. a thousand weighted coils draped around my tired chest.
the businessman finally silent next to me, his grief exhausting him to sleep, the plane begins its descent. my safety card folded up in the seat, i can still see the faces on all the cartoon passengers, calm and stoic amidst their situations. mothers checking the seat belts on their children, passengers adjusting the face masks of the people sitting next to them, they know they're all in this together. i close my eyes and try hard to feel like they do and I wait for the impact.
-blh/oct. 2006
dark as fuck
ReplyDelete