Oh the airplane. As a write this I am suspend some 30 thousand feet above the ground with nothing but a few inches of plastic and metal separating me from thin white clouds, roughly 530 mile per hour winds and oh yeah, death. I’m listening to Something About Airplanes by Death Cab (yes on purpose) and I notice we are flying so fast it looks like we are suspended in mid air.
Did you ever hear the story of the man who was flying on your average commercial airline (name of the airline withheld for legal purposes) when suddenly his window bursted open? If it wasn’t for the cat like reflexes of the stranger from Omaha sitting next to him, he would have been sucked through the window resulting in quite the fall. Can you imagine falling out a plane window to your death? The nursing student in me is having a hard time not wondering what would to your body. Would it crack and scatter like a watermelon? Or splat more like a tomato? Ew. Gross. (I feel sorry for the person who has to clean up THAT mess on aisle five.) Would you even feel yourself hit the ground?
How long would it take someone to fall 30 thousand feet? 30 seconds? A minute? Two minutes? I imagine my arms flailing, grabbing and searching the air for something, ANYTHING to stop my fall. Obviously that attempt would fail and now I’m in a struggle to stop my shirt from being blown over my head. (Hey, even in death I can have a little modesty.) Not only am I sailing through the air but now I can’t see and I’m going to die topless. Really? I guess being sucked out of an airplane was just the beginning of my worries.
But let’s pretend you had time to think. What would you be thinking about as you passed through the clouds? What would be running through your mind when the grass came into focus like a checkered board of browns and greens, as houses started to come into focus, then the streets and finally the cars parked on the side of the road and in driveways? Would you be screaming? Repenting of all your sins? What a person thinks about while falling 30 thousand feet to their unavoidable death screams volumes into who they are and how they lived their life. It’s too bad we can’t simulate this. Get pushed out of a plane and suddenly everything falls into focus-we could easily discover what we wanted to do with ourselves! That inner desire to do that one last thing would be unleashed and our biggest regrets would be revealed. Why did I waste my life at that stupid job? I should have gone to film school. I wish I had spent more time with my family. Why didn’t I go to church more often? Did I leave the curling iron on? Who is going to feed my cat…? Splat.
(I apologize for being insensitive if anyone who reads this has lost someone due to plane window malfunctions.)
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