As the tiny plane ascended higher and higher, and I craned my neck to get a final look at the IKEA store that had tempted me cruelly and mercilessly through the departure lounge windows, we suddenly dipped sharply and awkwardly to the left. A second later, there was a disconcertingly audible BANG!, a noise I'd never heard on a plane before in all my years of flying, a noise that sounded inherently wrong. Instinctively—it was funny how instinctively—the man and I both reached for each other, me with my left hand, he with his right. I grabbed for him without thinking, the way I would have grabbed for my boyfriend or my mother or father, responding to a split-second of panic the first way I knew how. He did the same, perhaps in that sliver of an instant thinking me a wife or girlfriend or daughter, and for the briefest moment we were each other's person.
I don't know whether we reached out to reassure or to be reassured, to comfort or to be comforted, to protect or to be protected, but that tiny lurch towards each other—my heart hammering wildly in my chest, my breathing suddenly on hold, the panicked blur of a thought: is this it?—was so instinctive, so quick, and afterwards, when the plane leveled out and we all smiled nervously at each other, so suddenly and vaguely awkward, that it seemed somehow momentous, truthful, unabashedly honest. Perhaps that's all we ever want, those of us who claim never to be afraid: to know that if it ends—when it ends—someone else is there, right there, in the seat next to us, holding our hand when it happens.
By Holly Burns
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