The Last Flight

by Julie Clark

You might be shoulder to shoulder with someone living their last moments as themselves and never know it.

“If you pay attention, Claire, solutions always appear. But you have to be brave enough to see them,” she’d said, plucking my hand out of my lap and squeezing it in hers.

Everything you ever wanted is on the other side of fear.

Are we who we say we are, or do we become the person others see? Do they define us by what we choose to show them, or what they see despite our best attempts to conceal it?

Everything you ever wanted is on the other side of fear.

Eva could walk away with no regrets, knowing for certain the past held nothing of value for her. That sometimes, the death of a dream can finally set you free.

“It takes a long time to learn how to see the world as a place where people aren’t doing things to you. My husband didn’t set out to break my heart, or Ellie’s. He was just acting on his own desires, living his own story.

hope I can be the kind of person who looks toward forgiveness first.”

But what I’ve learned in life is that in order for true forgiveness to occur, something has to die first. Your expectations, or your circumstances. Maybe your heart. And that can be painful. But it’s also incredibly liberating.”

isn’t just what has been done to each of us—by Dex, by Claire’s husband—it’s a system that tells women we are unreliable, and then expendable. That our truths don’t matter when set side by side with a man’s.