• And in that very moment of utter despair - the moment of the final solution of my life. I woke up, eyes glazed over in sleepy crust. A yawn. A stretch. Blissful serenity of the last moments of my dream. Real life is never a surprise from dreams, I find. Don’t take my word for it, but there’s really no difference between a dream and reality - it’s all just perception. Manipulation. People always just think that dreams are better. People always just talk about how real life utterly sucks compared to the complete and total freedom of dreams.

    But that’s just it. People think, people believe, people dream. It’s natural for them to think dreams and fantasies to be better than reality - it’s what they want. Change. Difference. Something new. A getaway from the same-old-same-old.

    I find the most refreshing thing in life is to wake up to your own demise. One could never really understand how completely and totally ideal it is to open your eyes after a serene fantasy of flying through the air, a thousand miles an hour, screaming, to see that your airplane is really, truly, honestly hurtling toward the ground at terminal velocity with nothing to stop you…

    But the ground. What goes up must come down. It’s just that people usually want to come down just as they went up. Slow, steady, controlled. Safe. But that’s not always it.

    I hear the screams and the cries. The ‘I Love You’s’ and the ‘Goodbyes’ everyone and their mother scrambling to make their last moments useful. Out my window I can see the smooth cover of clouds, we’re still quite a bit away from the ground. The ground below is hardly visible. To the right of me, I find two empty seats, I think I remember them being filled earlier.

    I release my seat belt and attempt to stand. I don’t particularly want to die having to pee. Smashed in the last row of the airplane, I find that the bathroom is close and empty. I relieve myself, not without difficulties, and then make my way back to my seat. A five foot walk at an almost ninety degree angle is not a fun walk, but nevertheless I do it. I take my seat again and half contemplate putting on my seat belt. Laughing, I leave it off and look out my window.

    Above my head air masks are dangling and people are screaming as a luggage compartment opens and, ironically, nothing but pillows and blankets let fly into the cabin. I take note of God’s sense of humor. Maybe mother nature. Maybe the Pastafarian god, you know, the one made of noodles and meatballs. Whatever, something, somewhere has a sense of humor and I truly appreciated it.

    Outside my window we break though the first layer of clouds. People are crying and I so desperately want to tell them to shut up and enjoy the ride for what it’s worth. It’ll all come to the same end, a pile of burning bodies in a heap of twisted metal and fire. Why waste your breath? I sigh and close the window-flap-thing, I never really bothered to learn it’s name.

    They say that before you die a moment of nostalgia over comes you as the past rushes through your head, all your mistakes, all your accomplishments, every last detail of your pitiful life thrust through your brain just before your body slams into other bodies that slam into plastic and metal. I can’t help but to think that maybe, just maybe, I should have held out for the flight tomorrow, instead of insisting to get the earlier plane. It’s not like I actually had anywhere to go, anyone to see.

    I hear people, through their incessant squabbling, whine about the unfairness of the world. I hear them sobbingly tell no one in particular that they did nothing to deserve such punishment. They were innocent, they had so much to live for. They never did anything wrong. Ever. They were innocent. All of them.

    Except me. I’ve done my fair share of terrible deeds and then some. Maybe by some divine coincidence all of the perfectly white slates of every passenger on this plane can’t atone for my dark, used, abused, and long-since-forgotten sense of morality, my purity. Tabula Rasa must’ve skipped me. John Locke never anticipated me.

    I’m not saying I’m a terrible person. I’m not saying I’m a bad guy. I’m just saying that I’ve done things that I’m not particularly proud of is all. I took a stroll down the wrong path. Or whatever. Call it what you will, bad coincidence, unlucky, wrong place wrong time, bad connections, whatever makes you happy.

    At this point, you’d expect the captain or stewardess or someone to come over the intercom and say that things will be fine. It would be a total lie, but people would cling on to the last hopes of survival. The fact is that no one claims that things will work out in the end and we’ll coast gently down to the ground in an emergency landing and no one would die.

    The fact is the captain knows that we’re doomed.

    The stewardesses know that we’re doomed. Why challenged what’s set in stone?

    It’s amazing how loud and long an entire cabin of plane passengers can scream. I briefly wondered if it could set some sort of record. The Longest, Loudest, and Most Pointless Screams: Held by Flight 1472 to New York, New York. somehow I doubt that would ever be a record. I push the thought out of my head, the cabin shakes around a bunch and my hair is blowing in front of my eyes in a mess. Time seems lucid, slow. It feels like I’ve spend an eternity in free fall with a bunch of strangers whom will share my grave.

    “The moment of death can last an eternity. You feel that you’ve been waiting to die for hours when really only a few seconds have passed. Like an acid trip.” at least that’s what Jenna always said, she was an expert at acid trips. Who would have guessed that the was right about the death lasting an eternity thing?

    Jenna was a girl I met just before I dropped out of college. She showed me the LSD, Oxycontin, the black beauties. She was already a tweaked ******** when I met her. Her favorite saying was ‘A tweaker is as a tweaker does, pass the Valium.’ I must’ve heard her say it several hundred times sitting on her kitchen floor, the linoleum dancing, twisting, turning, popping out in every direction as we talked about things tweakers talk about.

    Drugs. Parties. Drugs. More drugs.

    She always told me just to stick to LSD, just stick to Heroin. Stay away from PCP. For the most part I listened to her. I loved her the way an addict loves their syringe. I loved her the way a doctor loves their scouple. The way a cancer patient loves having what’s left of their hair being brushed. Jenna and I never got high without each other. We shared pills, needles, stashes, anything. Everything.

    Jenna made me promise not to do PCP, I obliged because I was fine with what we had. She never told me why, though. She only told me that the one time she did it things didn’t work out too well. I never pressed the issue because by the time I thought to ask another needle was in my arm.

    I find that plane crashes aren’t exciting. No rush of adrenaline. No sense of nostalgia. Not even fear. But don’t take my advice, see for your self. Through the screams I can hear the captain over the intercom, I can her him cursing, crying, begging, pleading. Nothing but human, just as pathetic and scared, and teary-eyed as everyone else. The lady on the opposite row from me is having a heart attack, her hand clenching her arm, eyes going beady, gasping for breath. I see her die. I see the moment that her heart ceases to pump. Glazed eyes stare at the floor as her body slumps over. Poor thing probably never had her moments of nostalgia, and if she did, they were interrupted by a faulty organ.

    I came home from scoring another load of black beauties. I call out to Jenna but don’t get a reply. I look in our room, on the couch, in the bathroom. Finally, I check the kitchen and there she is twacked out and laying on the floor in a puddle of her own mess. The smell of something pungent hits me, maybe bleach, something strong. I look at her and see she isn’t breathing. I see an open jug of linoleum cleaning acid turned on it’s side and leaking all over. I see that Jenna drank it. I scream. I cry. I clean. In her pocket I find a bag of PCP. Do as she says, not as she does, I think. I cover her body up and take her to the lake just outside out house. I dump her. I never return home.

    In the cabin I can tell the ground is getting closer and closer. I close my eyes. I knew that trying to runaway from Jenna back to the very town I met her was a bad idea. It was all karma, coming back and nipping me in the a**. I laughed. A moment of pure silence and bliss. The screams are gone, the sensation of falling out of the sky put on pause.

    In reality the difference between a dream and real life is perception. Manipulation of hope. But in the end the both are the same, it all depends on how you look at it. My eyes snap open to see that really, honestly, truly, we’ve landed in the airport and everyone is happy and ready to leave. No one is screaming, no one is dead, the old lady the row across from me is alive and kicking. I hear giggling and people on cell phones letting loved ones know they’ve landed. I grab my bag out of the overhead compartment and walk down the aisle, a new town, a new start.

    A funny thing, dreams are.