I was kind of surprised when the water hit me; of course, I was expecting the fall to be much longer. And for my senses to cut out in the air. But it was shorter than I expected, because the plane had dipped and was about to crash. The water was ice cold.
I suddenly realised that I had jumped way too soon. I flashed back to a screening of titanic my mom had put on for my eleventh birthday. Kate and Jack were clinging to the white rail on top of a vertical ship, and Jack was explaining about how the Titanic was going to suck them down into the sea. So I came to the panic inducing conclusion that when the plane fell, it could suck me under too.
The fear kicked in. My adrenaline rush from the jump had been short lived, and now I was struggling in the sea, wet with salty water and buffeted this way and that by the wind created by the roaring plane. There was so much noise- I never expected death to be so loud. The pilot was trying desperately to keep it in the air, I could actually see his face in the cockpit; pained and sweating furiously.
Then I turned, and splashed out, thanking profusely whatever eternal being had made me book a flight in the morning: I don’t know what I would’ve done if it had been dark. I am terrified of the dark.
My mom doesn’t believe that we are afraid of things, like darkness and spiders: but only of not knowing what they are going to do to us. She believes that by facing our fears we can overcome them. I’m not so sure.
So I was grateful that I could at least see where I was going. The lights from the plane were going out one by one, and other people, oblivious of the horrible truth I had discovered, were jumping off of the aircraft. I tried to shout back to them, to warn them, but my mouth filled with salt water and I choked. There were a few people out this far with me and I called out to them, screaming for help, begging. But it was a wordless cry… and none of them looked back. I heard again the groaning, screaming noise of metal on metal as the left wing caught alight, tearing a gaping fiery hole in the underbelly of the plane. I caught the smell of burning hair.
There was a final scream from the plane, and, looking as though it had put all of its last energy into the climb; it managed to regain balance, skimming along the top of the ocean: cerulean blue against golden fire. It was finding its feet again, and in the cockpit I saw the pilot’s eyes had narrowed and he was concentrating entirely on the aircraft, as if he was trying to move it with his mind.
The plane crawled along the ocean.
I couldn’t watch. It was like waiting for death. Forbidding myself to imagine what was beneath me, I struck out, moving away from impending doom. Or something like that.
That day was the longest I had ever experienced. It was like the tides on a beach- the emotive climate I was surrounded by washed up and down. Just when I thought the day was over, the tide would come back and sweep me off my feet again.
The first thing that happened was the plane crash. It flew into the sea a few miles away from where our company of survivors was floating in the water. The fire that had erupted on the wings spread to the cabins, and so the aircraft took many lives down with it, including that of the pilot and his team. There was nobody in the cluster of shivering humans that surrounded me who knew what they were doing. It was mostly women and children, men having- typically of their stereotype- stayed to ensure the safety of others. Some called it chivalrous. I called it stupid.
For the longest period I have ever known, there was silence. I closed my eyes: listening to the way it sounded in my head. Then something punctuated the silence: a scream. My eyes snapped open, and I looked around me to panic, the sea no longer steadily rising and falling, but whipping the water around us into the air. It was like the water was filling up my oxygen supply; I was drowning in the air.
I blacked out.
