keyword: passage, title: between firmament and stars in misc. flash fiction

I’m no longer afraid of flying. Oh, it all still bothers me, the empty security theater, the seats designed for humans a foot shorter, the bleary soft-shoe shuffles in passage between flights, the long layovers in shabby food-courts, it still irritates me, but I am no longer afraid. This scares the hell out of me. It scares me that I’m no longer scared.

Recently, a friend asked me if all I’ve been through the last year, my dad’s death and a handful more all about my family, if it had changed my outlook on mortality as when I was younger, I died in my dreams every other evening. I woke screaming in terrible fear and sometimes couldn’t sleep at all in terror of not waking. He wondered if it all had brought me to a peace with death and it has but maybe not in a healthy way.

I’m less afraid of death now but not in gauzy new-age revelation or courageous acceptance, I’m less afraid because I’m tired. I still love life and still want to see more but this year has left me faintly exhausted and I can see where I may only be able to take forty or fifty of these. This grief and loss of living, the massive effort spent beginning it all again in the ashes, I can see now how later in life one could just be worn out. So, in that sense, yes, I am less afraid of death but in a manner that just disturbs me all the more.

On the plane back from visiting my brother on the other coast, I didn’t white-knuckle it there like when I went to Europe as a kid, I wasn’t imagining the floor beneath me disintegrating every half hour or so, wasn’t imagining a mile-high plummet to my death I was certain of back when I was twenty, when I was thirty. I was just too damn tired for that at thirty-nine, my back and legs hurt too goddamned much, there were connections to come and I knew I couldn’t sleep. I just asked for a coffee, put on a movie that I’d already seen and tried to zone out my aching into numbness. I am no longer afraid of flying and that lack of fear scares the hell out of me.

I should be celebrating living in the little slice of history where human beings have a chance to see the clouds from the other side, the sea of cotton balls above our Earthly sea of troubles when I’m up there. Barring that, I should at least be screaming in non-stop terror that only a quirk of physics is keeping a metal tube aloft between the firmament and stars. These days, I do neither, I just stew there with sciatica and the most recent Avengers film, worrying upon a lack of worry.

They say that the fear of not being afraid is the textbook definition of being a neurotic and, I say, they’re right.