The Abandoned Station

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Here's a Thought
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Hit The Plane Down

Sometimes your experience of time slows down to something like milliseconds and you can finally appreciate what's happening around you.

You don't start to focus on panicking in detail, though. That's a reaction that exists outside of this brief moment of observation. It's a reaction that requires your body's involvement, and while your heart and lungs and nervous system in general have leapt into overdrive to properly address the current situation, this sliver of time is not beholden to the needs of the body. Not an out of body experience because you are still seeing with your own eyes where they are, still hearing with your own ears where they are, it's all staying local, etc.

You take this situation as it is, along with a not inconsiderable amount of solace in the fact that they're all taking it, too, and maybe not with nearly as much professionalism (if you may say so yourself).

Sitting in a fiendishly quaking chair at what has to be much less than the good ol' thirty-five thousand feet because isn't it supposed to be freezing or impossible to breathe at that altitude? You don't know the exact science. You just know that the plane was supposed to be landing in Toronto in about fifteen minutes, not right fucking ha ha now somewhere around what might be Tobermory or Owen Sound, hard to say since the last time you tried to look out the window you still saw hint of blue that was either Lake Huron or Georgian Bay.

Stewardesses flying away like newspaper. Old people already limp maybe dead rag dolls strapped hopelessly to their seats. Terror in the faces of the still-conscious around you, and no chances for the cherished oxygen masks since the roof they were supposed to drop from is what's missing.

Oh, and the wind, you can't forget the wind. It takes everything and it's like it's wanted to take everything from you since you got up here, as if you've been invading its space every time you buy a ticket, take off your shoes, turn off your cellphone (well, put it in your pocket) during takeoff, gnaw at the smaller and smaller bags of peanuts, and watch a movie and a half that you can't throw yourself into one hundred percent because of the now expensive meal and all the bathroom breaks of yourself and your fellow passengers, and forget that death is outside and knocking and only a loosely held concoction of steel and glass away.

Until now, and it's making up for lost time.

You wonder about parachutes as you fight for another deep frigid, twisting breath.

Fuck.

Shit.

Hell.

Not quite.

Force yourself to think of loved ones. But you only think of them, which is easy because of how close they are. You make it all about them and that's fine at this point. You raise them to the status of ruler of the basic and elemental features of the universe. You wait to see if some sort of order will come and say that by doing so you are violating the laws of physics or becoming a blasphemer at the worst possible time.

But you don't see god.

Instead you hear Bowie.

I've never done good things

I've never done bad things

I never did anything out of the blue

You didn't make this happen. You don't have the proper instruments and materials to put a terribly volatile item or device in a duffel bag and even if you did would probably get all knock-kneed going through security and get picked out and asked to accompany some gruff-looking security guard into a windowless room.

But you really, really wanted this to happen. You really, really went above and beyond the call of psychotic, obsessive possibly-murderous duty to make sure that the plane they'd be taking would be this one, a comparatively rickety old piece of shit that should have been grounded years ago if money didn't triumph absolutely everything. A phone call to a friend of not-a-friend who works for a chief mechanic for the airline who you know is going to fuck the inspection up at the best-worst possible time to accidentally make this 707 a flying death trap.

And you took a seat at the back knowing that they were taking a first class semi-sleeper up front which means they can have a slightly more comfortable time screaming in terror as the fuselage finally cracks like an egg.

Which it has done marvellously, and the chunks are spinning like tops as they tumble to earth and shed debris and people and even as you're squinting in the wind in some sort of perverse joy that it's all coming together as it's all coming apart you are telling yourself that you locked eyes with them for that impossibly unending split second, that whole novels of thought were written in quantum flashes and sent from your brain to theirs and back again.

How's that for a final image of them. They’re tried to get away from you after all the shit they pulled and now it all ends with your eyes boring into theirs.

Good.

The whole reason you spend time with other people is so you're not reminded of yourself. Molesting uncles, lesbian bed death, absent mother, vengeful friends, opportunities squandered, lying the whole time lying on your back, fears double-backed and double-tracked, hideous orange-tinted eyes and backdoors, the opportunity to live through bad decisions a third and fourth time right down to the second, trapped in your body and mind like you always have been.

Jesus, is that what we're talking about?

A mouth full of steel so you can't say anything your tongue split in four places double snaked. Easy lies to smooth over things that only made the road worse weeks and months later. You forget who threw the first stone, shit, maybe that was one of the things you had in common in the early days.

They're sorry, you're sorry, we're all so fucking sorry for so many things and even now you don't know if you mean it because, y'know, duress.

Air.

Then water.

Trauma. Waiting for a fatal blow. A terrible crushing.

There’s a pain in the head, a broken something or other, but you found the next breath.

Not dead yet.

Chalk it up as a successful failure.

Pull me out of the air crash

(This one's on me, babe)

Pull me out of the wake

'Cause I'm your superhero

(This one's on me)

We are standing on the edge

END