“Turbulence,” I say. “Nothing to worry about.” I remember how I learned to trust those sudden drops in altitude by measuring what is spilled. The water barely judders in my bottle. The flight attendants continue on their way up their aisle without a flinch. In the vast reaches of the open skies, these jolts that trouble us so much are nothing at all, an infinitesimally small descent in relation to where we have climbed. But the human body is mistrustful of falls, and so we brace all the same. The problem is that air is strange to us. We do not understand its formlessness, its transparency. Its
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