Flying

Dave, my husband, is a pilot. He got his license in High School and flew in college. He hasn’t flown in a while, this is partially due to airplanes being so expensive, and also due to an incident where his alternator failed and he hand to land without power at night in rural Texas.

For our first anniversary, I rented us some plane time and he took me up. I almost barfed. I could trust him enough to sleep next to him at night, but behind the controls of an airplane? I mean, he’s the guy who broiled on a cookie sheet and fed me silicone chicken.

I wanted to fly too.

I’ve said this before. I don’t believe in bucket lists. If you are going to do something, do it. Make it happen. Too much of life is spent planning. I mean, how many of those Pinterest ideas have you actually done?

Six years later, thanks to some delicious crackers, I flew. I don’t think I realized how scared I was until we landed. When I stepped off the plane, my shoulder blades relaxed, my eyebrows separated, my jaw unclenched. Every part of me was trying to keep us in the air.

As a kid, my parents took me on a family vacation to Kitty Hawk. There we raced in the sand dunes where Wilbur and Orville Wright first took flight. I remember thinking how amazing it must be to be the first man to soar with the birds. To let your feet leave the ground. To be suspended in the expanse.

I forget that. Sometime in between the first time I looked up at the sky and saw a plane and met wonder, and when I shuffled angrily onto a commercial airline, I forgot the horror and awe of flying. Taking my seat between a man who smells like wet onions and the aisle where the flight attendant kicks my foot and rolls his eyes when I ask for water, I forget that for those three hours I am peers with the clouds.

Today, I flew. An instructor was right next to me. Dave was behind me. Yet, I kept mumbling, “Oh god!” into my headset when the wind rattled the plane. But there was a moment, when I took my eyes off the horizon, and I thought how beautiful this ugly little Cessna was for letting me step off the edge of earth, just for a few minutes.