Tag: aeroplanes

Anxiety.

Lucy

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.

Leaving KL.

Lucy

On-board Malaysia Airlines flight from KL to Mumbai — February 2018.

The plane hurtled down the runway.

Tipped, to fill the window with a sea of green, an endless landscape of pineapple trees.

Tipped again — her stomach rolled — an endless scape of sky.

It seemed less likely that a plane could disappear into a bright pineappled world than it had as they roared through the nothing night.

Dated September, 2013.

Lucy

The plane, despite its —— per hour, seemed to creep through the air, orange lights slowly edging along the ground below, growing only infinitesimally closer.

When the plane landed with a rough thud the girls in the seats behind her gasped and giggled. She felt nothing, and contemplated the nothing feeling; evidently it was not the plane ride that could explain the afternoon’s growing anxiety. Really the argument never had made much sense — she was not afraid of flying.

The plane drew slowly towards the terminal. The captain was speaking again; she tuned in to hear him say, ‘…the local time is a quarter to eight…’ A quarter to? They had been due at eight. The plane’s early arrival seemed impertinent, and fifteen minutes of immobility, strapped into the narrow seat, seemed an unbearable proposition. She was hungry, which heightened the sense of discomfort in her core.

Though she usually felt a kind of amused disdain for the passengers who leapt to from their seats the moment the seatbelt lights were extinguished, on this occasion she was quickly on her feet.

As she power-walked up the —— she was glad of her comfortable blue espadrilles.