Flight 4481

It’s morning: the east growing orange over the burnt hills, over miles and miles of endless desert. The earth slowly turns her face towards that yellow light, and the darkness shrinks into shadows, taking refuge behind the lonely plans that still cling to this barren land. They’re picking up speed, taxing. The wheels spin faster and faster, and she holds her breath before takeoff. She feels the immensity of the earth, the weight of every breath in her body. There are the memories that have sunk to her stomach, like so many stones. This plane could not be airborne, could not possibly rise with the strengthening wind over this brown, brown earth. She is too heavy, too full of things she can’t name of explain.
But they defy gravity, the wings bend slightly just so and they’re up. She watches as the ground shrinks below her, the miles spreading out as they speed heavenward. There are no birds that can ascend this way, but she wants to let that heaviness she feels fall back towards the earth. She wishes to shed these sorrows and joys that hold her to this earth, she wants to feel them peel away and alight on the breeze, like white feathers. Instead, the rocks she feels in her stomach shift as plane shifts on its axis, pointing north.


In hours, days, she sees the ocean. It feels like a miracle after the miles of dust. But really, they’re not so different. The sky turns orange, then deepest pink, as the sun sinks away to the horizon. She is reminded of an impossible sunset that feels farther away than all the miles she’s traveled. These colors are the same, through now she sees them far above this land and sea, the same sea she once set all of her hopes upon. The plane, not the same but equal, dips through clouds and they see is white, two moments of oblivion. They’re out, inches closer to the sea that now turns an inky color, then falls away completely into infinite darkness. The fading light, now deep purple, outlines the distant mountains that bravely rise from the sea. The mountains are black, black now like soft darkness in lover’s arms, she thinks. She feels sentimental for these places she imagines so often, she feels the weight of her memory but something deeper. In this little plane, she feels impossibly small in the world. The rocks in her stomach grumble and moan, but she’s ready. She’s ready to cast those stones away into the sea, and emerge from the waves light and white like feathers.