As I Watched

Laina Lowry
As I Watched

And as the plane began to fall out of the sky, I was pondering on the possibilities. What all could be happening elsewhere, as were enjoying our flight through the clouds? I was shaken awake by the first jolt. And as I watched the first timers worry, we started to shake.

A couple of years previous, I found myself screaming as loud humanly possible. I was eleven years old and my life had just begun. Or so I thought. I thought a lot of things. Still do. But that’s when it all started. My mind was very over active. You see, at eleven, I was one of those children who might be described using the quote, "curiouser and curiouser." I would endlessly write just to stare at whatever words fell onto the paper. My favorite time of the day was whenever i found myself outside. My favorite place to be was one singular branch at the top of a tree, where i could watch the birds above and the people below.

One day my mom came into my room really early and had shaken me awake. As my eyes opened slowly and the blurriness began to fade, I realized I wasn’t in my room. I looked at my mom with a questioning look as the people around me became apparent, and the melancholy white walls visible in my peripheral vision. I was later told that I had fallen out of my perch in my tree. I had broken my elbow, my foot, and fractured two ribs. My mom said I was never allowed back in that tree again, and that is where she found me an hour after we got home.

My Ipod was still on high in my ears, so all I heard was the flight attendants voice muffled over the intercom. I assumed it was the normal announcement of the turbulence that the captains assuredly had under control. But the people around me were still a bit shaken up. That’s when the second jolt came. Passenger’s feathers were extremely ruffled at this point and I could hear a few simultaneous yelps here and there around the cabin. i returned my gaze to the window. Below I saw a sheet of white clouds, but just a bit ahead of me I had a clear view of the planes left wing. I had read all the safety warnings on them several times before, imagining odd situations where the passengers would climb out mid-flight with there floatation devices because they didn’t like the flight attendants. This time though, I stared a bit past the wing, at the early afternoon moon.

She told me she would be back to get me soon. That had been 5 hours ago. So I assumed she had gotten lost again and hopped on a bus. I sat down across from a woman looking about mid-forties, with extremely wide hips but a peculiarly flat belly. She had a small nose and huge, red, glassy eyes. She looked at me for the whole ride, but I was never uncomfortable. I just stared back. I imagined what I might have looked like to her; a very young girl, about five, obviously on the wrong bus, with mousy brown hair, and itty-bitty lips. My eyes, much too big to be anywhere near proportion with my nose. So strange, it was cute. I had on two sweaters and a winter coat, as was normal in Upper Canada. But I also wore shorts and flip-flops. She didn’t know it, but I was never able to feel temperature on my legs. "What’s your name?" I asked her. She seemed startled by my sudden movement. "I-i’m Rebecca," she stuttered, "what’s yours?" it took me a moment to think of a good answer. "Clarissa Worthington-Howe" I answered, thinking of a name from a book i had recently read. "Miss Rebecca, will you be my friend?" I asked. "I would love to" she replied, a warm smile now appearing on her thin, long lips. We got off the bus hand in hand, and from that moment, she was the woman I had called mom.

A tap on the shoulder brought me back. I looked over to see a frantic looking old man. "Is your cell phone on?" he spit out, "ummm, no" I replied. I wondered if he was referring to the lie forced upon passengers that cell phones make airplane engines explode. Or whatever the reasoning.

We were still shaking, very violently, at this point. i had begun to think about how all these people came to be here, and their connection to me, to one another. I looked out the window to see green. I started to worry, since we already seemed to be descending and I should have been looking at the white snowy caps that came with Canada. Then an announcement was made relaying difficulties that were of course, under control. People were talking loud and fast, making calls with both cell phones and the provided airplane telephones. That’s when we started to fall. We still seemed to be pretty high, so I figured it would take a while. I imagined several ways to save the day, like Violet Baudelaire, inventing contraptions to slow down the plane, or convey the people to safety. But all I had were my books. So fore the last 17 seconds of my life, I was floating in the cabin, having unbuckled myself, and telling the old mad next to me that I enjoyed our short discussion. I don’t think I ever really realized that I was finally doing the one thing that never ceased to appear in my fantasies. I was flying. My mind was wild, as I looked at the people screaming and sobbing all around me, I couldn’t help but smile. Time was just beginning, everything sunny and blissful.

170 miles away, a wide hipped mother was searching the crowd for her fourteen year old daughter, who had gotten on the wrong plane.