I should be somewhere over the Indian Ocean right now.
I should be strapped into a flying death cabin that rattles so much every now and again that the thought of dying shifts lanes in my brain from fantasy to possibility. And – whoop – another rattle, one just violent enough to remind me that maybe I don’t welcome death like I always thought I would; my arms are neither open wide nor waving in long-awaited enthusiasm, but clutching the armrest I have spent the better half of the flight asserting dominance over. Maybe falling from the sky in the company of a hundred other strangers, one of which leans too far back in their seat, one of which makes the little hairs dance around the perimeter of their nose when they snore, isn’t the complete and utter essence of comfort I thought it could be. And for all the times that I’ve wished I was dead, none of them included being on my way to Europe.
But I’m not about to die on that plane. Die at home, possibly. Die in the supermarket, maybe. But the world in which an international flight could whisk me away from this biscuit-shaped island to another, bigger, better, more European biscuit-shaped island, is a world as far away as handshakes and hugs. I wonder if the same people who worry about planes crashing and bombs exploding are as equally freaking out at the potential death that now surrounds the air around them. Because the 7 o’clock news has traded in terrorist attacks for overflowing hospital morgues, traded in freak shark attacks for record virus infections.
I can’t even remember what the news was like before all of this. What on earth was worthy enough to make headlines before the world started to – slowly and in the most boring fashion – end?
I can’t even remember what life was like before all of this. Before the world started ending, that is. Parties? Did I go to those? I mean, I have memories, but they’re surely not from this lifetime. The girl who sits on the edge of her bed tonight with greasy hair and pants that don’t fit cannot possibly be the same girl who once drank too much cask wine and threw up on an empty stomach.
Is it me that has changed? Is it the world? Can one change without the other?
The weapons that we’ve calmed battles with, the artillery that we’ve used to saved grace, are finally our un-comings. The handshakes and hugs, the kisses on both cheeks. No, please sir, one point five meters, take a step back. The space we now leave between ourselves and each other may help us defeat the enemy, but what about our sanity?
What sort of world have we kidded ourselves into believing we live in if our final un-coming is neither the climate nor the nukes, neither the aliens nor the sun? I guess our final un-coming is ourselves. The ultimateplot twist.
Plot twists are fun and all, but ideally when they involve Keanu Reeves and hunky bank-robbing surfers. Not exclusively, but ideally.
All of these we are the virus memes that have littered the internet in recent months kind of encapsulates this perfectly; this category of meme is just fodder to the current brand of millennial existentialism. Normally we’d find this brand hand in hand with some idealised, romanticised, wholesome version of ourselves, in bed with one another somewhere in Europe. But all of a sudden, for Australians anyway, Europe has become just that little further away. I won’t be finding myself there for a while now.
Apparently, you’re more likely to die in a plane crash than at the hands of a shark. Europe, for me, has been postponed exponentially. I’ve got no way of escaping this island by flight for quite a while now, and these surrounding oceans aren’t looking so inviting with their Jaws themed music and single fins poking out of the water and all. Any potential death-cabin sky trips feel so far away that I’ll probably start fantasising again about what it’s like to drop from the sky, a place where humans do not belong, in my humble opinion (where are our wings?). Potential shark attacks are also exponentially off the agenda. Even if statistically I’m more likely to suffer death by plane crash than death by shark, you won’t be finding me waddling about in the ocean (where are my gills?).
And even with the abundance of ways in which I’ve imagined my death – all of the fantasised plane crashes and ill-fated swims – death by airplane and death by shark still feel a little closer to reality than death by handshake. But the reality right now is that my body carries the potential for both your death and mine, and all we have to do to be at its mercy is touch. The oceans nor the skies hold the sentence to finish my living these days, but rather the everyday reality of the spaces in-between.
And in between the sky and the sea, you can find me in my home, or in the supermarket. The two most interesting, and two of the only, destinations I am allowed to exist in these days. Physically-speaking, this is where you can expect to find me. Spiritually-speaking, however, I don’t think I’ll be finding myself in either of these places. I guess the part of me that is still hiding someplace in Europe, with all the answers to my existential quarter-life millennial dread, will have to wait a little while longer until I can go looking, until this un-coming of ours stops becoming, and miss rona finally releases us from her grip of plot twists. Because I’m not enjoying this movie anymore.
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