Fourteen was the year of firsts. I had my first (real) kiss, my first funeral, my first surgery, and my first physical fight. This gamut of firsts pales in comparison to my first flight. I was forced to adapt my expectations of flying when boarding the compact monochromatic tube with accented by metal fins. My expectation was fanciful; insisting on feathered wings and an ideal that would allow me the room to extend myself as physically possible. The plane was packed. Every seat occupied. I managed to make it to the sky but my excitement flattened as space became a dear commodity. “I don’t know what you were expecting” my sister teased. “This is how it always is.” Having flown twice before, she knew the abhorrent absence of spacious comfort …show more content…
I did not notice that she had at some point sat down across from me until I laid eyes on her. She barely contained a frame to herself at all and her posture resembled a crumpled sheet of aged parchment paper. Her eyes and mouth shut thin and tight: She was an entire lifetime captured in a small kitchen mouse of a woman. I imagined that she was planted there, that she had grown out of the seat itself and blossomed. Here she was now wilting and sagging in a slumber. I don’t remember how long I observed her—in double takes and entranced stares. I often could not tell were the chair and her body began. Maybe someone had been tucked and sewn her into the cheap fabric of the seat. Her hands were tucked under her legs and her bony arms acted as pillars for her head. Though the plane shimmied through the sky like a wayward bullet, she remained board-stiff. Still. Maybe even dead, I thought with a shiver. Perhaps she was what the dead looked like; I didn’t know, for at my first funeral I refused to see my perished relative’s casket. But this frail woman was the look of a person laying peacefully in their grave. For whatever reason she had decided make her resting place a mid-point somewhere between departure and destination. I felt half a need to push her away or awake. I couldn’t tell which would be more inappropriate so I sat confined to myself, almost mimicking her mute …show more content…
A woman behind me screamed. Others erupted into a sudden chorus of murmurs as a baby began to wail. I turned to find the sleeping cenotaph across from me now awake and wide-eyed, her gray hair falling over her face as she sat up, confused and attentive. I was no longer bored, but struck with fresh anxiety. I tried convincing myself that I could not be nervous, that my stomach was full with something other than fear; however, the incomprehensive yelping of some unseen man did me no favors. I thought I had abandoned all frail human anxieties on the ground but here they fumed like the hollow scent of recycled air. The thunderous wind turbulence shook me awake from a dream and I found that my concerns were congregated around me, gleeful and