airplane ride
people slump against seat side, asleep as the night spills in through the windows. we are alone up here, below the stars and above the clouds. we are quiet up here, letting the engine speak for us long and slow. she says ‘flyyyyyyyyyyyy’ and we fly above the world. we’re running from the sun, all of us. diving into shadowed cloud and holding our eyes shut.
i sit swallowing the wine in the air, to drunk myself to sleep because i am not yet old enough. the sleepy night sinks into the plane. i feel lit. we’re ugly floating heads in the sky, lit from above. reading our words from paper books and blinking, breathing, watching people on five inch screens sell their faces.
the sun is far behind, running from us too. i am never close enough to hear what the sun says as she flies. she is too firey to let us near. maybe that’s why we all run.
we’re so misplaced all the way up here. you don’t feel it until you close your eyes and tell yourself how far you are from the ground. it must be a hundred miles. when it makes me scared i remind myself i’m not scared to die. other people don’t seem scared of being so far from the ground, they trust the plane because it’s still singing ‘flyyyyyy’.
even when i’m very tired i can’t sleep here. my head lolls and begins to fall and i stiffen and straighten and am wide awake again. i dream about planes crashing. it wouldn’t be nice to wake up here after one of those.