The Cassandra of American Airlines
The captain just came on the intercom to prepare us for bad weather in the next twenty-five minutes, so it’s time for me to become spiritual again. I’ve learned to mitigate my own fear of flying with flying more, and remembering I am self-centered and dramatic and don’t know many things. But I still can’t resist tricking myself into thinking I have any power at all. I will bend time and space to ensure my own survival.
I carry out my rituals, like a vicar swinging incense up and down the aisles of the plane, ready to be seen by a God who doesn’t see. I open and close the window several times. I do the sign of the cross during takeoff, self-consciously; I don’t want the person next to me to know the truth, that I’m afraid, and don’t believe we’ll make it. I can’t help it. I take a deep breath as we lift off the ground and hear the roar of the engines and watch the cars and buildings below us fall away. I see my own destruction— on land, or sea, or somewhere worse and vague. I am the Cassandra of American Airlines.
“Do you know when it’s going to stop?” I asked a flight attendant once during turbulence over the Rockies.
“Do I know when the turbulence will stop?” He answered.
More than crashing, I am afraid of ascending. It started when I was 14: My mom and I flew to Boston to see my cousin graduate from high school, and on the way back, as we began our descent into Philadelphia on a cloudy-cold evening in June, the plane was forced into a holding pattern. We circled for nearly an hour, and I kept looking out the window to check if we’d been cleared to land, only to see the same clouds from before. I had the sensation of falling up— sucked higher and higher into the atmosphere until we’d left orbit and were drifting away from this planet into the silent gulf forever. I asked my mom several times if she, too, felt like we were climbing. I worry like she does, so knew I could count on her to meet me in panic.
Instead, she told everything was OK, and to relax. I spent the rest of the time betrayed by her calm, and furious at my cousin for graduating high school. Years later, when I was a junior in high school, it would return on a flight home from Hawaii, where I remained upright and wide-eyed for nearly twelve hours, waiting to see the horizon outside my window begin to tilt as we started our journey into space.
In the early, disorienting days of MH370’s disappearance, one report claimed the plane had climbed to 45,000 ft or more— well over the human limit on a commercial flight. Intentional or not, the altitude would have suffocated the passengers, granting them some swift mercy before the plane slammed into the ocean. I thought about my teenage nightmare. Maybe it was possible. Or maybe I was a dumb and narcissistic.
Twenty years have dulled my fear of flying, or turbulence, of being lost in the sky, muffled in the surging drone of engines and wind. Once in a while, I let myself relapse, desperately seeking affirmations from my patient husband as latch onto his arm, burying my face into his sweatshirt, or panic-text friends on the ground. I check daily turbulence reports in the few days leading up to a flight, and download apps that calculate my odds of plummeting to a fiery end.
I will go to the restroom on the plane and sit on the toilet, and pray with no faith that my end will be quick. And then nothing happens. It is fine. The plane lands I step off and am alive for now.
***