Is Everyone Crashing In Planes Without Me?

The LA firestorms were more than a month ago and already a year has gone by. I feel personally victimized by time. I’ll be 36 in two months and my chances of being in a plane crash before then are higher than ever. There was another one yesterday, this time in Canada, which our current president would like to annex. A Delta flight from Minnesota landed upside down on the frozen tarmac at Toronto’s Pearson airport. Something about 40 mph gusts upon landing, mechanical problems. Who knows. The plane was landing and then a second later it was upside down. Vanished into a fire ball once it hit the runway and skidded along belly up. Many were injured but everyone survived. Passengers described hanging like bats from their seats. They filmed themselves fleeing through emergency exits, hurried out into the icy Canadian afternoon by airline employees who I can only imagine have given up.

There was a plane crash in Washington D.C. last month. An American Airlines flight collided with a Black Hawk helicopter while landing over the Potomac. It exploded, broke in half, and sank into the river. No survivors. A few days later a plane nosedived into a neighborhood in North Philadelphia. No survivors. One person on the ground died, too. A few weeks later a plane disappeared over the Alaskan tundra. They found it shortly after. No survivors.

They’re gutting the FAA. They’re gutting the government. They’re blaming Gay Mayor. They want him to pay for his gay transportation crimes. The gays are ruining air travel. So are trans people and black people and women and immigrants. Maybe they want us to be afraid to fly. They want us to be so afraid that when Elon takes over the FAA we’ll be so paralyzed that it won’t feel worth it to fight. Maybe it’s Big Train wanting a comeback. Or maybe they want just want us on the ground for whatever comes next. They don’t want us to go anywhere. No one is allowed to leave the US. No one is allowed to leave Canada. They want us right where they can see us.

No one can fault anyone for being afraid to get on a plane right now. No one wants to plummet into the ocean, or into a field. No one wants to explode in the clouds and fly out of their seat and fall into the night. No one wants to be identified by teeth or loose DNA. Almost every time I fly I accept my death. Well, I think, it’s been a good run. I clutch a rock my husband found in a river in Montana, or a chip I got in AA. I turn to mysticism while flying. I reconfirm myself as a Catholic. I flirt with 90s Kabbalah. If I am not fretting, the plane will go down. The responsibility to keep myself and everyone else around me alive rests on my shoulders. It is my cross to bear.

I remember a few times when I flew with my family as a teen, my mom would look over at me as the plane revved up to take off and sort of shrug and say, “At least we’re together!” Her Irish fatalism on full display. She means it, though. She’s probably the best flyer I know, aside from my husband. She loves being on a plane. When my mom is on a plane, she’s on vacation, and if she and her family happen to die together, so be it. Vacation is vacation. I haven’t reached that level of monk yet. I’ve gotten better, sure. Especially since getting sober. Even when I would take Klonopin and drink exactly eight Blue Moons on some cross country Jet Blue flight and felt like my head was resting on my shoulder like a parrot and my neck simply a wide open mouth, I was still afraid. I envisioned my body resting in a hanger in a black bag, among my fellow doomed flyers, waiting for my loved ones to be shuttled over from whatever airport hotel ballroom the airline had assembled them in.

I try to avoid flying at night. Planes feel like they were meant to disappear at night. Disappearing is a fate worse than death. I think about Air France 447, alone in a storm in the middle of the Atlantic between Africa and South America, vanishing from radar at 2 in the morning, only to be found two years later on the ocean floor. I think about Malaysia 370, the pilot radioing some time after midnight and never again, the plane pinging for hours into the next morning, passengers unconscious or dead in their seats from hypoxia, food carts rolling back and forth down the aisles, cell phones ringing, before disappearing forever into the violent expanse of the South Indian Ocean. Or maybe it just fell through a rip in this world and was taken somewhere else where fear and pain aren’t quantifiable because they are too small. The plane continuing its journey to the center it’ll never reach. Traveling deeper and deeper into the void.

Nothing was ever the same after that plane disappeared. It was the beginning of whatever timeline we’re in now. Everything shifted. Everyone disoriented. Everyone searched. They asked us to! That’s how futile it was. Courtney Love thought she found its oil slicks on Google Earth.

People mocked her but it was a valid theory as anyone else’s. I remember feeling comforted that she was thinking about it, too. I didn’t feel alone. Courtney stood with me. The pilot was blamed; a disgruntled employee committing suicide but not wanting to go alone. Others said the plane was stolen by Russia so Putin could confuse the world around the time he invaded Crimea. Landed in the desert of Kazakhstan. KGB things. A plane door and other parts have washed up on the Eastern shores of Africa, reigniting hope that was eventually ruled out. Recently I’ve seen a clearly deep fake video banging around Reddit of three UFOs circling a 777 that’s alleged to be MH370. I believe in aliens, I just don’t believe they did this. Whatever made this flight disappear is far more terrifying than evil. It’s ambivalence. It is the void.

Right now I can only conceive of traveling long distances on horseback. I don’t even want to get in my car. I am certain a plane will crash into my fuckass Ford Fusion. My Narc car. Serves me right for driving it. We won’t have cars soon, anyway. We’ll be forced to rely on covered wagons. I can get into that: my pioneer woman tea, minus the manifest destiny. I’m just trying to get to CVS for my SSRIs before those are taken away from us, too. Empires fall slowly and then all at once, right? We’re in our lead poisoning era. Unrelenting incompetence in the name of nationalism, or whatever.