This piece was written and recorded for Write Club Quarantine Edition: Trick or VOTE on 10/20/2020
Welcome aboard Pandemic Air! Whether You Want to Be Here or Nottm. Please affix your mask properly, but we’re totally not going to say anything if you have the thing hanging down below your nose. We think conflict is icky. And freedom is tops! We want you to enjoy breathing in the 40% restaurant capacity air currently being recycled through a Glade Plug-In we call “sanitized.” It’s VERY cold in here, to make all 143 of you feel sterile. Please enjoy sharing your armrest with Jaxon from Tampa who is here on spring break because he needs to “let off some steam” while being “unafraid of COVID.” Make sure to share surfaces, air, and droplets with him freely since we refuse to know that droplets are part of the spread. Outright refuse. We will be coming around shortly with alcohol and communal snacks.
Flying, specifically takeoff, used to be my biggest fear. Not a current flight, being in close proximity to people who are generally garbage and breathing in their spit air while I clutch my inhaler like a security blanket, but getting on a plane at all. The fear just popped up one day, unannounced, because it was “in the neighborhood,” of my general anxiety. Despite several unbothered flights, one day I looked down, saw mountains, and was entirely certain we’d be crashing into them in a screaming fiery ball of flesh and metal. Upon takeoff, my brain would split, trying mediate a divorce between the advancements of modern air travel and my lizard brain screaming, “THERE IS NO WAY THIS HULKING TIN TAMPON IS GETTING OFF THE GROUND INTACT, LOOK AT THAT FREAKED OUT BABY, HE FUCKING KNOWS.”
Then, with the help of time, hand holding, cyclical breath, and a few years of stretching out my dead mother’s remaining valium, I was able to fly again.
Adorable that we could get over fears in the BeforeTimes without being hit with a new one in the next 14 seconds.
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We’ve just turned off the seatbelts sign, because it’s not doing anyone any good to stay in place. Please feel free to move around, interact with others, and open schools. Go to work, gather in groups, have a rally, go see a movie, get close and take selfies, kiss a stranger. Eat with abandon indoors while people serve you for three actual dollars an hour. It doesn’t matter anymore. The exits are blocked.
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It takes effort to get my body airborne. I push my shoulder blades down into my back, hands firmly at my sides, each muscle united in its intention. Once I’m at a good height, I can focus on steering, my arms now making swimmers’ strokes as they cut through the air. I have to get a good distance off the ground, out of people’s reach, before I feel safe. They’re always so angry on the ground. They’re furious at my audacity, and at their own leaden feet. I speed above and then past them, their fists shaking, while I look for a rooftop or a tree to hideout in for a while.
It’s punishment to wake up and realize my muscles ache from engaging them while I slept for a thing that doesn’t exist. A thing no human, not even me in secret, can do. I can’t fly like that, no matter how real it feels every time.
We look at flight as the reward. A bell rings, you die, your menstrual blood doesn’t stain your underwear, you drink a Red Bull, you feather your hair just so, you fry chicken parts and throw delicious sauce on it, you put Tim Daly and Steven Weber on tv for seven real years, you have. Wings. Congratulations, you have the ability to get up and over everything on this mortal plane. Hell, when you go, we send an entire...flock? Chorus? Murder?... Of angels to CARRY you the fuck out of here. Hallelujiah, by and by, you will fly the fuck away.
I was never the type of person to think about the way they were going to die. That seemed pointless. I once accidentally rode my bike down lower Wacker Drive, screaming. “Today’s the day! Today’s the day I die!” just in case I needed to sound prepared. I am more the watch-my-daughter-sleep-and-cry-thinking-about-all-the-moments-of-her-life-I’ll-miss-when-I-die type. Morbid, just not particularly fascinated with how I’ll go. My parents: suicide and COPD. Two very different fights, and they both lost. No matter how valiantly we fight, we’re all flying the fuck away. At our current rate, Americans wonder if we have tinnitus with constant bells ringing, giving people their winged tickets up and out of here. Flights leaving every minute, every second. By and by.
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As we prepare for landing, please be aware that you will continue to fly Pandemic Air even after you’ve left the craft. You may not be in the air, but our air is in you.
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In every flying dream, there’s an angry troglodyte who wants to fight me because I can fly and they can’t. (haha) BRING IT. I have 15 years of martial arts training to be a warrior in a garden instead of a gardener in a war, so get you someone who can do both. I don’t want to be weighted down and swinging for scraps with you. I am trying to get up and I don’t want to wait until I’m dead or on a commercial carrier of disease to do it. Get out. Of my way. I am trying to see what the hell we’re fighting FOR because I cannot wrap my mind around the chaos down here. Turns out, I was never afraid of flying, I was afraid the flight would stop before I was ready, either because I woke up or we crashed. Equity and justice do not exist on the ground where I’m fighting you, your racist high school friend, and every All Lives Matter What If Fuckpaddle keeping us sick. Fighting to fly is fighting to get up.