Anxiety.

Bandra, Mumbai — February 2018.

I had been afraid — some element of superstition had mingled with the dread that unaccountably, always, clung to my chest. The great barrel of metal, furnished in grey plastic, shaking and rattling with the vibrations of the air pressed against it, had seemed flimsy. Its breaking-up slowly, piece by quiet piece, under the force of its unnatural journey alone, had not seemed far-fetched. The creations of humanity inviolate — I could not believe in that myth in this lonely expanse of dark empty sky. We might slip away — the great violence of our breaking muffled and rendered silent by the cloud. Though as a child the noise and energy of a plane’s take-off had worried me, never had I felt so deeply disquieted by flight — a distress without urgency or focus, a heightening of my new natural state.