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Not to be dramatic,but I was about to die.
Every time the plane shook, my life back home in Seattle flashed before my eyes. My dog Shatner wiggling his butt when he wanted walkies. Brunch with my best friend Jill that was really just an excuse to drink mimosas at ten in the morning. Sitting at my desk designing corporate websites while my boss senthurry up, Mollytexts every few hours.
That last scene kind of hogged up the memories.
My fingers shook as I notched my seatbelt a touch tighter just in case. It dug into my stomach, but that was a small price to pay for the extra security. If security even existed up here. Pretty sure we were seconds away from a free-fall.
As a point of interest, nobody around me seemed to feel the same. The young woman in the window seat next to me had pulled her hoodie closed around her face and slept slumped to the side since takeoff. The man on the aisle had watched three Marvel movies in a row, unfazed by the plane rocketing around like The Hulk had it in his big green fist.
Meanwhile, I’d spent the flight surfing a panic wave, unsuccessfully trying to distract myself with TV show reruns and wishing I was home in bed instead of thirty thousand feet in the air.
The intercom chimed, and the pilot’s voice sounded over the PA. “Folks, we’ve begun our descent into Edinburgh. There’s a bit of rough air ahead, but it doesn’t look too bad. We should be on the ground in twenty minutes.”
Rough air. Code forIt’s about to get wild up here. I touched the edge of the air sickness bag still neatly folded up in the seat pocket in front of me. My stomach squirmed from all this bouncing around, but I prayed it wouldn’t act up. I’d made it through the flight to Boston without getting sick. No reason to start now.
Hear that, stomach? Don’t start now.
The plane jolted sideways.Sideways. No way that was normal. I hugged myself tighter, sitting ramrod straight in my middle seat. Wait—were you supposed to go limp in a crash? Didn’t matter, my opportunity for going limp in all this racket ended when my Valium wore off two hours ago. Even before then, I hadn’t been all that relaxed.
Did I mention I hate flying?
We kicked to the side again and my brain played all sorts of harrowing images in my personal movie theater of horrors. Death from above. Plummeting doom. Crashes and nosedives and bursting into flames.
My mouth went dry and a chill sweat broke out on my forehead. Was escaping the city and my ex-boyfriend’s wedding really worth this? Getting my passport stamped for the first time had seemed like a greatbest revenge is living wellidea a few months ago, but now I deeply regretted every single choice that had led me here.
I’d been on exactly one flight before last night. Sixteen years ago, I’d celebrated college graduation with a trip to California with Jill. But after a horrible panic attack capped off by fainting in-flight, I’d steered clear of plane travel ever since. My vacations had stayed within easy driving distance, never requiring a boarding pass, let alone a passport. I chose from a selection of hotels on the Washington coast where I could walk my dog on the beach during the day and indulge in room service in bed at night.
But then I’d heard about my ex-boyfriend’s engagement six months after our breakup, and getting out of Dodge had seemed like a great idea. I’d spent four years with him waiting for something more to happen, thinking surely this time that sense ofI like being with youwould transform intoI don’t want to be without you.But discussions about marriage had mostly consisted of vague verbal filler.“Well…ah…maybe…uh…”The last time I’d brought up the future, his lackluster“I guess we could get married, if you want”had convinced me to end the relationship. I didn’t want a proposal that had all the enthusiasm of a man deciding on frozen pizza for dinner.
How had he gone from that to what I had to assume had been a genuine proposal six months later? Wasn’t there some unspoken rule that the person who does the breaking up was supposed to be the first to start dating again? I hadn’t ended things with Sean thinking I would immediately find someone new, but I hadn’t expected to hear he’d magically overcome his fear of commitment, either. I wasn’t jealous of his fiancée, I was just a tiny bit angry with him for moving on from me so spectacularly well.
The woman next to me came to and lifted the shade over the window to peer out. I’d come all this way for the sights, but not even the blur of green outside could tempt me to look. I stared at that reassuring little sliver of waxy paper in the seat pocket a few inches from my face, hoping my stomach wouldn’t lose control, all while an icepick slowly drove into each ear from the change in cabin pressure.
Seriously, who thought air travel was so great? What was the draw?
I slipped the note Jill had left for me out of my e-reader cover. I’d been over it about a hundred times already, but I could stand another read-through.
Molly,
DON’T PANIC. Air travel is the safest form of transportation in the world. Turbulence doesn’t bring down planes. You’re going to have an amazing time in Scotland, I promise. Think of the lochs. The mountains. The kilted hotties. You’ve got this.
Jill
The plane bumped around like it had a bad case of the jitters, the engines whining and whimpering. No, wait—those sounds were coming from me.
Yeah, her note hadn’t helped.
I shut my eyes and sank into the image that had brought me across the Atlantic in the first place. A lush green hillside with a well-worn walking path leading to a craggy pinnacle of rock. A lake shimmering behind it with low rolling hills in the distance. The scene crowned by a deep blue sky crowded with thick white clouds. Absolute heaven.
Isle of Skye, here I come.
Soon, I’d be hiking those paths and breathing in fresh mountain air. Biking around lochs and listening to all the bagpipe music I could handle. Taking pictures of every blessed thing like an intrepid nature photographer instead of the nerdy website designer I was. Ten days exploring Scotland without a single worry.
Fingers crossed, anyway.
The woman at the window shifted back into her seat, revealing nothing but gray outside. Tarmac.Oh. I stiffened up again, preparing for landing.
