FALLING
I was floating, heavy and weightless. The air swung me gently with the wind. I was so high above the red brick house that I could barely see the form beneath me clear enough to recognize my brother as he swiftly stepped out of the front door then scaled each step in a frenzied gait towards the car. He hesitated for a moment with his left hand on the roof of the car and the other on the handle. His head slumped low and I knew his eyes were closed. I knew what he was contemplating. I was there with him, inside the walls of his skull, pounding and pulsing like the angry vein on his forehead.
He lifted his left hand when he saw a trail of red against the white metal of the car. He felt the wetness first, then the sharp stinging. He did not wince. Although there was no visible sign of regret, he knew that he should not have thrown that plate. He knew it as he watched the blood drip onto the concrete below him.
It was too late now to go back into the house, to apologize for something he didn’t feel was very wrong. He simply wiped the blood on his dark shirt and dug for his key in his pocket before slamming the car door behind him.
I begged him not to go; I pleaded and yelled for him. I didn’t know where he was going or for how long, but I did know that suddenly the air was becoming very thick and he was leaving me here. I shouted, louder and louder. I was screaming, but the words were lost somewhere in the thickness of the air. He turned swiftly out of the driveway as if he had heard nothing at all.
He drove too quickly down the street. The force of his foot on the pedal was too much. Too much exhaust spewed from the cheap muffler; it thickened the air even more. It was crushing me. I fought to expand my lungs against the pressure.
Suddenly the air gave underneath me. I was falling, horribly fast. The ground was too close, the sun too bright. I was hot and terrified  and—
“Excuse me, Miss.” I gasped at the air, shocked at its thinness.
“Excuse me, there won’t be another opportunity to eat until you land and I cannot serve you unless you make a selection. Would you like the chicken or the pasta this evening?”
It took me fifteen seconds of confused searching in her round grey eyes to comprehend that this woman had spoken to me and that I was alive and here and not falling.
“Chicken,” I said and only after I had spoken could I hear the tremble of my body in my voice. I looked down and was embarrassed to see shaky white knuckles clasping both arm rests.
Luckily, before I had grown conscious enough to hypothesize the humiliation I might have just caused myself in the throngs of my nightmare, the attendant had continued on and I found the passenger to my left to be peacefully asleep. I was jealous of her serenity and frankly quite annoyed that she hadn’t been awoken as I had when I noticed a post-it note on the tray in front of her that read “pasta” in neat script. We had made small-talk just before take-off. She’d told me in broken English that this would be her first time in America. I had smiled and tried to sound genuinely interested for her sake, but my mind was clearly elsewhere.
I could not rid my thoughts of the story Carmen had told me a few days before, during my last night out in Spain. A girl in her village of just fourteen or fifteen years had dove, head-first, off of a tall stone wall in the center in broad daylight. Carmen’s family had seen her standing on the top of the wall, erect and indifferent. Before they could consider the purpose of her position, he fell.
Carmen went on to mention, of course, in dramatic detail that her father had rattled a trail of Spanish obscenities and how the whole thing had been scarring for everyone involved, but I just kept seeing her there, long and beautiful. It was as if she was on the ledge in the center there, where Carmen relayed the tragedy.
Why had she chosen such a public place? Had they heard the crack of bone on concrete? Did strangers cry? Did children cry? I knew nothing about this girl, but I couldn’t help but think it was a bit selfish for her to do it in that way. I hated myself for allowing the thought. I knew that sadness could swallow a person whole, steal their rationality and their personality both, but it seemed to me so hurtful that anyone had to witness the death of another human being the way I could see it now. She didn’t hesitate. She did not flail. There was no visible sign of regret. I could not and would not understand it.
But still I had to.
I respected her life and did not embitter myself at her decision to end it in such a manner, but I had to understand. Maybe I just wanted someone or something to blame.
I opened the window in hopes of clearing my mind, but the darkness outside only worsened my anxiety. A sadness pressed into my chest and paralyzed me in my seat. I wondered if this was what that girl had felt like all the time. I looked out into the blackness and imagined the darkness swallowing the plane and me and this tragedy in a single silent gulp.
I tried to look away, but I could not move. I retreated by looking into the glass of the window where I was met by my own reflection. I looked into my gaping pupils. My eyes became hers as she stared, watching the concrete grow closer. It was not romantic. It wasn’t triumphant. She simply stared into the surface that would abruptly and sharply end her life.
I wanted to scream and run to catch her as she fell, breathe with her and sing with her and pet her head. But I knew that, like in my dream, the air was too thick in those dark eyes. Like my dream, it was just a memory I had never had.
It occurred to me, in that moment, that perhaps she saw herself fall every day. Perhaps she would have stared out this window with her blank eyes and seen herself, spinning through the frigid air, spinning quickly and without aim.
I had heard before that people often sought to match their outer selves with their inner ones. The evidence of this was unfortunately all around me. I had heard that people hurt themselves so that they can feel something, anything, and at the same time nothing at all. I supposed this might have been the case with this girl. Maybe she just wanted her body to be hurt on the outside like it did on the inside. Maybe she just couldn’t handle the disparity between her body and her mind, between death and life.
Perhaps she had been dead a long time before she fell, perhaps only a short time, but it horrified me to think of how quickly she might have become dead, how easily she might have pretended she was fine.
I hated in that moment how I had considered the whole scenario, or even her, so beautifully, with such poise. I wished there were more disgusting words to describe what had happened. Everything about it was so awful. Everything. I wanted it to repulse me. I didn’t want to be fascinated. I wished I had known who she was before.
I imagined her falling again, but this time I was there. I felt the heat of the sun blistering my neck, the stickiness of my shirt on my skin, and a headache throbbing between my eyes. I felt fear and confusion then sickening shock. Warm vomit collected at the back of my throat. I watched its chunkiness drip onto the scorched brown grass.
I saw the emergency workers awkwardly placing her body onto a stretcher. I saw the crunched eyebrows of the onlookers, her sobbing parents with mouths covered, but mostly I saw the ambulance drive away in no particular hurry. I saw people return to their half-eaten plates of cheese, discuss the tragedy over beers. I saw them get too drunk and clumsily spill their glasses. A kid fell asleep on his mother’s lap. A waitress gets fired when she drops a tray for the second time today. Vendors bargain necklaces and bracelets. Elsewhere, lives are instantaneously destroyed in every other millisecond, but here, here people eat and drink and go to the bathroom and do normal people things because they have to.
I looked up and saw the freeze-dried chicken in front of me. I did not recall lowering my tray. The sauce the chicken was swimming was slightly reminiscent of the vomit in my hypothetical memory, but I it reminded me of what my conscious self had just told me. People ate and drank and went to the bathroom and did normal people things because they had to. They carried around a horrible painful sadness, but that was how they lived. They ate gross airplane food. They tried not to think too hard about all the terrible things around them, but they refused to ignore them. They felt sorry and angry and sick all at once and hated the people they loved.
They breathed in and out until they didn’t breathe anymore. They watched themselves fall from far away and willed their bodies not to do the same. They cheated, lied, and stole. They sang, they fell in love, they watched sappy movies, and they shamelessly cried in loud weeping moans. They woke up, fell asleep, did their laundry, and clipped their toenails.
That was what people did, normal people that I imagined in a realm that I created, apart from my airborne world.
I kept seeing everything so far beyond me: the car, the house, my brother, this girl. I wondered if landing at home would change things again, if making the infinitely vast small again would shrink my thoughts and fears into manageable pieces.
I thought that too many people on the plane around me were watching themselves fall in their heads. I feared that I would become one of those people; that my night-dreams would become day-dreams. I feared my nightmares and the way these shook my anxious limbs. I feared mostly that we were all “those people” and that I could never understand it. I feared the darkness and the rising of the sun. I feared being afraid.
I blinked hard. I turned to my Spanish neighbor for some sort of visual solace. Tears fell upon the pages of the book in her lap. A man two rows over coughed a chesty dry cough. The kid behind me kicked my seat, but I didn’t mind because I supposed we would be landing soon anyways. We would all land and maybe we would connect to another flight or meet relative or maybe never go back to the place we came from but we would be somewhere. We were going somewhere. Tired and gassy from plane meals and sore from immobility, we would be somewhere.
I hears the woman’s cries next to me. Her book had closed. She realized her tears. She breathed the dry thin air sharply in and then sighed, a long, slow, steady sigh.