40,000 Feet & Falling
Some flash fiction to shake off the rust after a holiday break.
It's cramped, my legs ache and there's no space to readjust them more than a couple inches. I should sleep but I know I won't. I'll shut my eyes and do my best to rest my overactive mind, but that's about it. I would complain more, but the ceaseless physicality of travel has actually been a welcome distraction. It stopped me thinking of you.
But here I am, thinking of you. Thinking of your face lighting up every time you came home from work and I was there to greet you, your wagging bushy tail as I wrapped you in my arms and you wrapped me in yours and our noses touched and our cheeks brushed and our lips met and your warmth melted into mine, our combined glow cancelling out the winter dark and the Midwest snow.
I've been in the sky for over an hour now, the movie I'm watching is wrapping up and it's a struggle to keep my attention from straying. I've tried my feet in every viable position and found each of them equally uncomfortable. The less novelty left to distract me the more I can't help but let recent memories guide my thoughts, the more I see your curves and feel them and find joy in the outline of you, from your hips to your whiskers, the more I hear your voice, hear your laugh, taste your tongue, taste your sex.
The more I want to cry. The more I need to. The more I know I'm going to.
Credits roll and I frantically dig out my complimentary blindfold, tugging my earphones out as an afterthought and pulling the blindfold over my head as a sound somewhere between a sigh and a sob escapes my muzzle. I'm flying for eight solid hours away from you. Add on six more in time zones. It'll be tomorrow when I land. I left you in the airport at one o'clock in the afternoon. I'll be in my bed thousands of miles from you at one pm tomorrow. I won't have slept. I won't have stopped aching for you. God, I don't know if I'll even have stopped crying. The fabric of the mask is as damp as the fur around my eyes. The two stick to each other, creating a temporary seal for my tears. I do my best not to blubber, not to call attention to myself, not to let the stranger sitting next to me know that this isn't just another flight for me. In fact it's not flight at all: it's free fall.
I'm going home. Supposedly I'm going home. But how can home be a place without you? I search for and can't find a satisfactory answer. I curse distance. I curse time. I curse corporeality itself. I can't quite suppress the next sob. I cover my muzzle in embarrassment and try to pass it off as an aborted sneeze. I feel an accumulated mass of tears break containment and trickle past my blindfold. I sniff and surreptitiously wipe away the loosed tears, trying to force reset my mind and body to some kind of equilibrium, but it's no use. I'm out of whack. I'm yin without yang.
I'm still hours away from touching down, landing in a city I can now only describe by your absence, settling back into my small life, my small ways, my busy days, my bustle, my quiet, my lonely--even in a crowd, even in a family photo.
But I will still get to talk to you. We're already planning on seeing each other again. My paws clench hard onto my knees, halfway between pinching myself to make certain of reality and simply needing to hold onto something, anything, to ground myself, no matter how many thousand feet I am up in the air.
The tone plays for 'seat-belts on'. We hit a patch of turbulence. The irrational, primal part of me that never evolved past mortal instinct fears for my life. I miss your arms more than ever. I miss your scent, your snore. When you spoon me, dozing, your tail wrapped around my waist I feel safer than Adam. But here I am untethered, flailing, life on the line, in the very belly of the serpent. If the turbulence tears this plane apart and air pressure rips me from my seat into open air, it would make no difference at all. No matter how hard I hold on, my knees won't ground me. No matter how tight my belt is strapped, nor how intact the plane, solid the floor, it can't hold me. As I said, I'm not in flight. I'm falling. And every foot I pass over the Atlantic I fall farther away from you.
Suddenly I am not afraid of death. Suddenly I am afraid, only, of dying without you.