plane ride
“I don’t believe in heaven, but if I did, I imagine it would look something like this.”
This is what I say to you the day we take off over the Pacific; it sounded better in my head.
But- you are implied, too. As being part of heaven, I mean. My heaven. You smile and squeeze my hand, and I assume this means you agree.
What I don't tell you, is that want to roll down the window, like actual physically roll it, the way you do in mildly aged cars, and breathe in the empty air. That I want to roll my hand through the waves of the slipstream and watch the frost encrust my finger nails and the veins on my wrist. That I want to reach out and touch the wisps of cloud that look like torn up cotton balls. That I could crawl out through the little window and jump, limbs tumbling over feet and hands and strands of hair, and I would hit the ocean surface flat like an iPhone screen cracking on linoleum tile. The cotton clouds wouldn’t even catch me, they would turn my soft skin to ice before I even broke their first layer.
I prefer flying alone. An airplane, it’s an opportunity. Not just to land some place different than where you took off, but it’s an entire two or five or ten hours with absolutely nothing expected of you. Other than to not blow up the plane. It is a space to think, above the clouds, below the stars, and in between the people you will never see again.
Perhaps this is why I often cry on planes. It feels–I feel–too important, too unimportant. Too tied to the place I’m leaving and too foreign from the place I’m arriving. It is a giant time machine made of metal and recycled air and stewardesses, pulling you from one idea of life to the next, and all you can do is sit and wait to find your time zone shifted and your surroundings transformed.
It is not that I hate, or even fear flying. And I’m not not afraid because of statistics and general airline safety procedures. I still daydream about crash landing in the middle of the Atlantic, frantic that I’ve tuned out the pre-flight safety lecture for too many years now. I’m absolutely sure I don’t know how to use my seat as a flotation device. I dread the exit row extra leg room for fear of the very, very rare chance I may be required to assist frightened humans in full-on survival mode. It is a fear, but not a chronic one; like pain in my head caused by too much drinking the night before, the fear only presents itself in the appropriate situation: take off, landing, severe turbulence, and being asked to verbally confirm that I will assist others in the case of an emergency. And then it passes. Because we are floating above the sky in a high tech contraption whose sole purpose is to carry me from one home to another.
It doesn’t feel like home. Here with you on this plane. And after the sun sets, it doesn’t look like heaven, either. I’m starting to wonder if I made the whole thing up. Not heaven–obviously that’s made up–but my heaven, our heaven.
My Sacred Private Crying Plane Space has been invaded by your extraterrestrial, non-stranger presence.
If this were heaven, would you be my middle seat soulmate? If you were in the window seat, and you could see the ocean and the sky and the coastline the way I can, would you see heaven, too? If this plane crashed and we died and went to heaven, would we even hang out there?
