For Those of You in the Exit Rows

For those of you in the exit rows:

It’s not worth jumping. Don’t even try. The windows are sealed with double paned fiberglass, sandwiching a pocket of inert gas and high-density polyurethane spines. The cabin door may look like it’s easy enough to open, but that’s only in the event of an actual cabin or systems emergency, when the pilot has activated the Emergency Maneuvers Button Console and flicked not less than seventeen attendant switches, only then does the automated clasp holding the emergency exit in place retreat into the latch housing and allow for unrestrained motion of the cabin’s over-wing doors.

So jumping up and heaving at the door lever will only succeed in revocation of your air clearance for the rest of your natural life, and no flight school will re-admit you, no flight attendant training courses will understand that you are a complicated and melancholy person. When you apply for jobs, men with sucked-in lips and furrowed brows will scoff at your portfolio, of which the only distinguishing characteristic is an FAA dossier clipped inside the front cover that bears a menacing, red-stamped "Aviation History Incident Report." You will become instantly never-remembered. You will have to travel to the international headquarters of a little-known Grecian island hopper and apply in proper so they can weigh your English proficiency against your sifted and porous resume (“Yes, that sure is all of it. I took some years off to become a homemaker”).

And make haste, lest your demons catch wind and clutch you before the wall of emotional security is mortared. You will have to act now, or risk checking into that motel off route CA-111 in the Salton Sea with its half-blinking “Bombay Beach Motor Inn” sign, except in the dark, when it reads “Bom Beach or Inn.” You know that if you go back there, this time there will be no return, no crawling back full or focus and resolutions.

No: you will stockpile your 401k’s weight in booze. You will cry while watching daytime television, searching for curatives, you will cry lamenting a bad lot in life and you will die thinking something’s broken in you, that something broke long ago, that something had never worked, could never work, as long as ruinous thoughts existed in your clanging head: coins shaking in a bell jar, rattling harder, sharper, crashing.

Then you will become pieces. And sink. And like a ripple, your memory will spread. Just the ripples now, lapping at what remains, reminding everyone. And they will have to guess, “What could I have done?” and “Is she at peace now?” and, in their own difficult times, “Where is my friend?”