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𝙄. EVER SINCE NEW YORK.
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SEATTLE, 2009
FLYING FROM INDONESIA to Seattle was a whole lot more complicated than I would've guessed.
I'd done Boston to the island of Sumatra before, but that had been in a army helicopter with someone holding my hand the whole time. I'd even suffered through a long, painful flight between Quebec and Paris a few summers ago, but that seemed to be nothing compared to this.
This referring to four flights all in the succession of a few days, all laden with the tension of what was to come and what I'd left before. I'd spent four whole flights suffering in lonely silence, jaw locked and fists bunched. Flight one had been Sumatra, the island I'd been working on for the past few months, to Manila in the Philippines, a brief stop there, and then a connecting flight onto Vancouver. I'd opted for a layover before a short flight over the border, down into the Seattle airport, but that had barely helped- I'd spent the night in the hotel wracked with stress, my head spinning and my fingers twitching.
It was only when the home stretch was in sight, when the air hostesses' did their final strut down the length of the cabin, that I allowed my fists to unfurl.
I hated flying. I hated it. I wasn't exactly sure what it was about the whole affair, but something had my heavily medicated anxiety jumping at my throat the moment I felt the rumble of the jets through my body. To the contrary of my fears, I hadn't actually ever had a bad experience on an airplane, they'd all been generally pleasant, with the air hostesses taking extra caution with my visible discomfort. Back in the day, I'd been slipped the odd glass of free wine but that was no longer an option-
"Would you like any beverages?"
Ah, those words.
My mouth was suddenly dry. Swallowing was like deepthroating a handful of sand or taking a drink after a long eventful night.
I found myself hearing her even above the Dubassy that I was pounding into my brain as a bid to drown out bad thoughts; I meekly pulled out an ear bud and eyed her pristine, glossy smile. Before that, I'd been holding an intense staring match with the person's head in front of me- a balding man who was stockpiling all the complementary goods he'd been offered- but now my eyes dropped from her slightly exhausted, strained expression, her smart uniform (neck-tie and all) and the cart behind her.
I hesitated.
I must've looked stoic on the outside, but inside, there was a full war. Sigmun Freud's wet-dream. My ID and Superego were having a full WWE brawl with every blink I took. The silence was suddenly uncomfortably as my fingers dropped to my purse. My common sense attempted to sway my hand away from the bills I'd converted back in Vancouver, but my need to distract myself from my impending doom was stronger.
