It seems the more I fly, the more I fear the possibility of a death by plane crash. I can see it so clearly.

The booming groan of an engine failing mid-flight. A sudden jerk turned into weightlessness as our 80-ton death chamber plummets towards it’s fate below.

It was only a toy! A toy charged with holding the lives of too many, one that can at any point be plucked from it’s trajectory and sentenced to a fall through eternal nothingness down yonder.

And it is a game! One we play at ferociously. Tinkering to find better ways, faster ways, ways that are sleeker and more clever than all of those dated, more inferior ways of the past. Ways that reach the sky in their ingenuity and dance circles around those that never dared to dream big.

But who is smarter now? Who more clever than the ones flailing gracelessly towards earth, returning to the place from which they leaped with so much irreverence?

I see it almost every time. In fact it is almost the same exact scene. Sometimes more vivid than others, and the finer details usually vary – like the color of the stewardess’s hair, for example (she is always beautiful), or the person who will go down in the seat next to me (she is sometimes beautiful). No, not a takeoff goes by where my mind doesn’t stumble into this dreadfully forbidden scene. Like candy left unguarded on a far too reachable counter, it is just too easy.

It starts with an awe-inducing loudness: the perilous groan of an engine grinding to a halt. For one second frozen in time, all turns a deafening quiet. Stillness pervades. Each passenger holding their breath in disbelief.

I glance over at the flight attendant for reassurance, but she too is paralyzed. One single tear falls down her horror-stricken face.

Of course, this is all in slow motion. Things like this always happen in slow motion.

A twinge strikes my heart in the realization of what just happened. Or more accurately, the consequences of what just happened. The unfortunate twinge of knowing hit as the sudden drop turns gravity weightless. The cabin is laced with revulsive disarray. There’s fresh coffee floating toward the roof, an airline branded stirrer charging ahead of it above a cup tumbling the wrong direction side over side. Papers, electronics, the empty snack back you’d conveniently forgotten you stuffed in the seat back in front of you.

A gaping pit finds its way into my stomach.

And.

We.

Fall.

The moment that follows – this beautiful, timeless moment – I like us to approach with an equal sense of forgiveness and intrigue. For in this moment exists the deepest philosophy of everything making us human. It is the lurking inevitability that comes hand in hand with life; how we face the dawn of mortality when its time finally arrives. What do we experience in those precious moments, in between?

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a term for this. Bardo is the transitional state of consciousness between death and rebirth. The most common meditative practices in this sect are meant to prepare you for the very moment of death, so that we may live our best lives, yes, but also so that we are prepared spiritually when our own time has come. It is helpful to remember that little in the way of worldly possessions will be of much help to us.

And so I ask myself, what will I think of once I reach the understanding that death, in all of its decisiveness, is here? What will I choose (will I be able to choose?) once I realize it is finally time for my existence – this existence, this miserably poetic existence, to come to a close?

Will it be her? Some beautiful projection sent down to escort me into whatever world lays beyond? Or will I let fear win, crossing over in a state of hell that I myself create, mere moments before I get the chance to finally know whether that’s the ticket I’ve already stamped for myself in those painfully few years I had here on Earth?

No, it will be nirvana! Somehow, I will choose nirvana. I will find it, find whatever insight chooses to strike within the tragedy of it all. And peace will fall over me, transporting me from this life to the next, because in this moment I will have reached out and touched it, I will have found a way to achieve mastery over my mind and my emotions and my fear and gods be damned I will become one with it all, floating coffee included.

I am a Buddhist monk. I am a mountain. I am a fucking sage. There will be no attachment and nothing to hold on to – only the knowledge that I am minuscule and irrelevant and that this is the beauty of life. It will be a revelation that falls somewhere between profound and absurd, and I will die with a smile on my face, or maybe just a smirk, knowing that in reaching this understanding, I have won. I will die a knower and a winner because that is all anyone can really ask for, is it not?

Or maybe I’ll go down holding fast to the stewardess, that untouchable goddess with darkish-blonde hair pitched perfectly back into a bun. The one I’ve made lingering eye contact with nearly every time she’s walked down the aisle.

She’ll be offering me a drink when the engine dies. Forget about the weightlessness. The chaos. The fact that I haven’t yet summoned the courage to ask for her name. In our last moments we will be overcome with a ferocity that can only be explained by our impending doom, and connection will be our chosen vessel.

And oh, how we’ll choose! We’ll choose because it is the one choice we have in the face of everything good and unknown being snatched so violently from us. It will be an act of passion and fury. Our thoughts with be mutual and triumphant over the injustice of it all. Together we will laugh at death by choosing to be alive! We will kiss and grope at each other all the way down.

Wait, oh no, is that my mom sitting next to me?! Where the hell did my mom come from??

I’d hear her sigh loud over the engine, fretting over my wasted potential as if somehow, this is all my fault. “Me, I made a prosperous life with your father. But you, you’re so young. How can you be dying so young? You could have been a doctor, you know.”

And I’ll feel guilty that she’s disappointed, and she’ll feel guilt that I’m feeling guilty, and I’ll feel even worse that she has to die feeling guilty, and all of this will be underlain with the profound confusion that somehow, I’ve utterly let her down.

Alone. Maybe I’ll just be alone. It will be only me on the plane, and I will have all the time and quiet I need to conquer this bastard called death. And because I was alone, people will know that I conquered it – believe that I conquered it – this fear, this universal question that is the greatest question of them all.

They will think of me as valiant not only because I sought the answer before them, but also because I did so alone. Everyone is afraid of doing death alone, but they don’t realize that we all end up doing death alone. The irony!

“He was a braver man than I,” they will think, and they will even say something of this at my funeral.

My nightmarish dream is broken by the soft touch of a stewardess offering me a snack and hot coffee. Her hair is a darkish-blonde, tied neatly back into a bun. Our eyes meet for a second longer than they should. We smile and blush, our fingers touching as she hands me the cup, and then her eyes grow wide with terror.

The engine has just sirened to a halt.