indiana_j | Fear of Flying (Reply)

I'm not sure where this came from or if it's any good.

For the most part, he hates flying.

It's not the height thing. He's stood on top of the Eiffel Tower, peered over cliff faces and skidded down the side of a mountain until his belayer was able to stop his fall. It's not the fear of mechanical failure. As trite as that saying is about when it's your time to go, he can't really find much fault with it. He can die any number of ways - falling out of the sky in a blaze of mechanical nonglory is only one of them.

Even if it is one of the more dramatic ways to do it.

There are other reasons for his intense, almost phobic fear.

It's the aisle seat every time and he'll even go so far to switch flights if he can't find someone willing to trade with him when the damned plane is full. Aisle seat, as far in the back as he can make it.

He sits, fingers threaded loosely through the others between his knees, as the modern day dragon glides through the air. The little screen in the back of the seat in front of him is one of the only ones still blank. In the darkened interior, he finds the garish light disturbing and he's disturbed enough without any help.

The typical 747 seats something like five hundred people.

Five. Hundred. People. In a rounded, elongated metal tube going something like 600 miles per hour in the air. He knows no one on this flight but he's spent the last hour and a half becoming intimately acquainted with some of the ones nearest to him. The one on his right is in her fifties and smells like it.

She also smokes cigars. It's a subtle smell under the layers of old lady perfume and it makes him gag every time she shifts.

The man in front of him has a gas problem; across the isle to his left, a small child is constantly sick.

A wave of unpleasant smells wash over him and he finds himself struggling to not think about not throwing up. To not thing about that greasy burger his wife made him eat mere minutes before boarding the flight. It sits on his stomach like a rock stuck in a stream, constantly rolling, never able to go one way or the other.

Down, digested. Up, in the airsick bag that the airline can't be assed to remember about half the times.

They put those stupidly annoying magazines in there but god help them to do something useful.

It's an overnight flight but it's early yet - the icing on the cake of unpleasant smells? He thinks they mean to make them think it's meatloaf.

But it's not. Nothing that smells like *that* could be called meatloaf.

The woman to his right eyes him suspiciously as he shifts, rubbing his knees nervously. It's probably considered impolite to thrust his elbow into her ribs but he's been thinking about doing just that for the last fifteen minutes. Someone apparently never learned about personal bubbles.

Five hundred people. Most of them probably civilized to one point or the other. Most of them would fight tooth and nail for their personal space on the ground. Put them in an airplane and suddenly it's like being in bed with a lover. Heated flesh pressed against shoulders as the competition for the armrest grows more intense. Knees creak in protest as they get shuffled out of the way by slowly creeping besocked feet.

Where, he wonders wildly, did her shoes go?

He does not need much space. One and a half arm rests, enough room for his legs. Nothing more than that. But it's like being in a constant battle.

He closed his eyes as her hand accidentally, or so she likes him to believe, knocks his hand completely from the arm rest. Her skin is clammy and gross, reminding him of dough long left out on some shelf in the back room of an absent minded baker. Teeth stained from smoking flash at him and the smell rolls over like a bulldozer – wilted flowers mixed with that sickly smell of someone slowly dieing even if they don't yet realize it, layered with smoke and fake meatloaf.

As a baby starts to wail, the ears unable to take the pressure comfortably, his gorge rises and he finds himself struggling with his seatbelt.

Damned things won't go on but they won't open when you need them too.

The stewardess is looking at him in concern as he pushes past her - she's warm to the touch from being on her feet and she took liberal use of rose perfume - and slams the bathroom door closed behind him.

Four walls. A space just big enough for him to move around in. The smell is of, surprisingly, a sterile environment with only the soap breaking it up. The toilet seat is shut, drowning out the constant whooshing noise, and he sits gratefully, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes.

Someone is murmuring on the other side of the door. 'Hates flying, poor guy'.

It is not the flying he hates, not really. It is not the mechanical wonder or the fear of death.

It is the overwhelming sense of humanity - the sea of noise and touch and smell. That is what drives him to his sanctuary of the bathroom.

For a few moments at least, he is alone and it is in the bathroom he rejoices in flight.