Airborne - Short Story

My first time flying was much like you would expect. I took flight, felt the exhilaration and joy for a brief moment then crashed. I got up, brushed myself off and returned to steady ground. It was months before I would try again. But the second time was better, the landing not as severe. Soon I had learned how to handle myself in the sky. The exhilaration increased while the minor scrapes and bruises healed.

We don’t all get given the same set of tools in life; our vessels are all of varying sustainability. Mine was faulty from the get go, it was never built for this kind of thing. The more I pushed it, the weaker it became, a devastating crash was always inevitable.

Being in the air is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t tasted flight, it’s more a thing to be shared only with other pilots. And even then it’s a look in the eye not words exchanged. As I traveled the world looking for new adventures and new ways to test my vessel I would see the arrogance and the lunacy in their eyes that I recognized from my own reflection.

After just a brief time airborne the ground life had become completely blase, the smell of lilacs in spring just didn’t do it for me anymore. My fellow pilots and I were somehow better than those who stayed with both feet firmly on the ground as we continually scoffed at their warnings. Old friends who didn’t see the validity in risking so much for a cheap thrill fell away and lost touch.

As I tested my vessel’s stamina, tell-tale signs of collapse presented themselves. I was too busy taking things to the limit to ever notice, often I put it down to my instrumentation being on the fritz, ignoring the check engine light more times than I would like to admit and in some cases when not even my old routine lies could convince me I simply pledged to a short, fantastic life being better than a long, boring one.

The open sky is addictive, the adrenaline, rush and excitement of being up in the clouds becomes all encompassing. Having to come back to Terra fir-ma to refuel and do the necessary maintenance was bothersome to me. I openly wished of a life in which I could forever stay in the sky, never losing the euphoria of being airborne. I pushed the envelope more and more, flying longer than I ever should have. I became increasingly reckless, so much not even the most daring pilots wanted to fly with me anymore. I had become a solo flyer, which at the time was fine with me. I enjoyed being alone since there were fewer distractions and no one to tell me how irresponsible I was.

But the landings became harder and harder. I could no longer ignore the damage my vessel was sustaining. The engines blew black smoke, the propeller choked and gargled constantly, the wings were held together with long stretches of tape and metal nails. By now I had alienated all those who had ever been a friend, I had achieved the ultimate solitude I had cherished yet still lacked contentment.

With my vessel in no shape to fly I choose to ignore its state and take to the air for what would be my last flight. Doom surrounded me as the sky hung low with gray and ominously heaving beasts of precipitation. Temperatures fluctuated as dense spring-air mixed with the cold remnants of a particularly severe winter. Not satisfied until every other pilot headed the warnings of a horrific sky I flew in and out of the sick, green beasts alone and higher than I’d ever flown before. I lost focus, it was as if the higher I got the more I blacked out and the less control I had, which somehow gave me a pale satisfaction of being small in a world I had believed to be mine. There were god-like moments that swung into my consciousness as I whirled through a labyrinth of puff-edged clouds and beyond up into where the torrent of no storm could reach.

Here, bathed in a yellow sun that highlighted the clouds below me in a way to make their danger appear peaceful and beautiful I shut the engines down and glided. Time stopped and all noise except the wind ceased. I should have been smiling; I should have been in awe in the presence of such profound majesty. I should have been feeling so many things other than dread but I wasn’t. Dread was everywhere, in me and around me because I had simply seen it all too many times, and been there, done that, so often that, there and that, just wasn’t a buzz anymore. The sky could no longer mask the terror of who I had become.

I circled above in the wonderful sunlight one last time, I felt like a cork circling the drain of its own demise. My heart settled as I stared into the eye of my own horrific destiny. Finally, I dropped out of the light and into the darkness of a storm cloud so unforgiving not even my arrogant confidence could see through it. My windshield was being pelted by giant balls of water that suddenly turned to hail. As the first crack shunted the glass and screamed across it like a bolt of lightning the silence was filled with ringing alarms and flashing red lights. My visibility was so weak I shut my eyes as I fell like Icarus who, too, couldn’t help but to fly too high.

The wind screamed, the metal screeched, the alarms squealed. I sensed it through tense, ram-tight eyes and swallowed it through broken, mashed teeth. The shrieks were like that of a thousand year-old tortured demon who belting and purged its pain into mine. My last memory was a prayer to not survive. I prayed to die.

_ _ _ _ _

The pounding of my fall crushed my body, my will and my heart. I remained shivering, quivering cold and clammy. Having lost all control of my bodily functions I soiled myself and lay in the mess that was once my chariot to the sun. I waited for a black hooded man with a sickle who would never come. I cursed aloud all of my regrets to no avail. I began to crawl around on a land that was so foreign to me I hardly recognized it. I didn’t want it, nor did I want the sky again. I was sick of being sick and tired of being tired.

A young girl appeared from the fog that surrounded me. She brought me water. Having given up on life I wasn’t helpful in receiving it. But once it touched my lips I wanted more. The freshness of something clean and pure filled me inside where only the poison of addiction had travelled. Her smile was gentle enough to make me wonder if perhaps I was missing something worth trading the clouds for.

I began to slowly recover. My flying days were over because my plane was as good as gone and because I had been in the air long enough to actually miss the smell of lilacs in the spring. I woke up on the inside. Colour came back to a world I had painted gray, and finally I learned to understand the beauty in stability. But I remember the screaming of the alarms, the sound of scraping metal and of the howling wind. And I remember the feeling of crashing when you have flown too high. I was scared now, and as I looked forward to something that resembled love I felt afraid of that too.

We don’t all get given the same set of tools in life; our vessels are all of varying sustainability. Mine was faulty from the get go, it was never built for this kind of thing.