Though I like the idea, I do not like flight once I’m in it: you just can’t trust the clouds won’t whirl you back down. I strain-smile at attendants but today I don’t really have the energy to engage with the blonde woman on my right. But I do take out my earbuds when she speaks. Because she’s trying and she looks like my mother who has always taught me to be polite, even when I am afraid. I envy the man on my left, deep in a crossword, his views of the ground. See, I hate the middle seat. And as of late, I’m not sure why existing feels this way: like I’m sandwiched between two people who maybe haven’t done anything wrong today. I have become this boy, fearful of the altitudes of a person, in a sky. But she lets me know that I can look at her magazines, if I’d like. There are celebrities on the cover so I refuse. But I’ll admit I’m not completely uninterested, just not in the mood today. It’s summer and it feels dreadful to focus on anything other than the news; which I think she, too, has been reading—going out of her way to talk to the other looking boy next to her, on a plane, trying to make up for anything someone else has done wrong today, or yesterday— wanting to help someone survive it all. I don’t know her like that but also maybe I do: I texted my mother “love you too” after boarding, before a white man, mad at his seating, walked up the aisle laughing at his own joke: saying “back of the bus” at a low volume. I start writing notes for poems in my phone and the woman with the aisle gestures towards her magazine, again, and I wonder if she is genuine, simply likes sharing her possessions with strangers. Because I struggle to buy this, and not search for something wrong today. What I mean to say is, I think we are both skirting around what goes on on the ground. The plane shudders and up whirls my stomach with the lunge of the cabin, and I squeeze the arm rest, and I see her see me do it, and the man to my left jolts upright, and I wonder if we were to plummet, right there, 28,000 feet, crashing somewhere above the Mason-Dixon, would the three of us all hold hands, and set the field on fire in a beautiful blaze?
