We are 30000 feet up, and I can feel a little flutter in my stomach as my breath catches, adjusts to the feeling of floating again. The wind echoes off the wings, off the walls, off the tiny plastic-back chairs where I adjust my seatbelt and tell myself there’s nothing to be afraid of.
I know there isn’t, but my chest still skips every time.
I push up the window cover, watch as the sky blurs from white clouds to patterns of greens, browns, and coppers—veins for highways, pencil lines for dirt roads, and houses with tin roofs like shiny pennies reflecting in the afternoon sun.
From 30000 feet I forget the reality—the sand beneath my feet, the warm permanence of the ground—the way Earth feels steady, secure.
The strange thing about flying is that you trust in the unsteady. A metal machine lifting into the sky, no roots, no feet planted on solid ground. You watch as the world dissolves beneath you—like a dream as you fade out of sleep, like watching water droplets slip between your fingertips to a puddle that’s heating in the sun.
And as crazy as it is to look down, you know someone looking up at you feeling the same way. Wondering how this fingernail-sized plane can hold luggage, and bodies, and dreams. Wondering how, 30000 feet up, there are hearts, and hands, and arms, and legs, tucked neatly into this silver speck with wings.
But despite it all, we arrive at our destinations.
And I know this, but as we descend, my chest still skips every time.
I watch as the yellow blurs become rows and rows of cornfields, as the ant-sized semi-trucks become solid and strong.
I hold my breath as I feel the rush of wheels against pavement, the jolt as we shift from weightless to heavy, to solid, to steady.
And then exhale. Safety, steadiness, peace.
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