i’m not scared of the plane hitting turbulence and falling out of the sky, i’m certain that that kind of death wouldn’t happen to me. i’m scared of a freak incident where cabin pressure dips without any souls or instruments noticing. everyone just sitting there breathing while something invisible has already started.

death scares me when it becomes someone insidious.

the other day i was white-knuckling my armrest as if sheer determination could help me win against my lungs’ requirements. i soon decided that my head felt funny and i couldn’t tell if it was the rosé hitting harder at altitude, or if i was right and the pressure was dipping and i was about to pass out and the plane would become a ghost vessel and i would be right for the final time. both felt real. both sat there like options and i was watching myself swinging back and forth between each, weighing up the logic.

i didn’t say anything to anyone. saying it out loud would make it real. once i speak it, it becomes real, and then i’m in it, so i stayed quiet and waited to see which truth was the actual truth.

i looked out my window and the clouds were doing something. they were almost blooming, almost becoming something and then not quite. i could see their structure and their patterns moving out of their confines, superimposing themselves onto what was there, almost like a drawing in my peripheral. the second i looked at it, as if making eye contact, it was gone. i couldn’t tell if it was the early stages of oxygen deprivation or just me.

i then closed my eyes and it was red-orange behind them. not dark. lit. too lit. like something was happening there that i wasn’t meant to see yet. i opened them because for a second it felt like foreshadowing.

then i was aware of myself being aware of it, like i was running some quiet internal assessment while also being the thing assessed. am i thinking clearly? am i about to pass out? is this how it starts? should i do something?  every question made more room for the possibility that everyone on this plane would  be dead soon.

no one else moved. people were being people and that almost made it worse.  if something was happening, it would look exactly like this. so i stayed there, somewhere between logic and instinct, just waiting to see which one would become true first.