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37 - Far

so sorry for the long wait :(

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37 - Far

Maya Sumedh 

It was more shock than despair – at that point in time I had nothing to despair over.

 Or at least I thought I didn’t – when slowly the fog in my mind cleared and I stood in the middle of my room, feeling the warm slippers under my feet and the cold air, I forced myself to think optimistically. Stupidly, I grabbed my phone and unlocked it, hoping to see ‘Message from Luke’ flashing but of course, it wasn’t – I realized belatedly that his phone must have been destroyed. And I put my phone back down, temporarily paralyzed when the image of Luke in a crashing plane filled my mind; I thought back to the last time he held me in his arms and I really, truly wanted nothing more than that.

 Light footsteps sounded on the staircase – my mother.

 She burst into the room, eyes wide and shocked, and immediately engulfed me in her arms. I stood straight, letting her hold me from the awkward angle. Then I turned a bit, and hugged her back.

 “He’ll be okay,” she whispered. “He’ll be okay, honey.”

 What if he wasn’t?

 “I don’t want him to be dead,” I found myself whimpering.

 Ma pulled away a little, holding the tops of my arms firmly – her fingers reached all the way round. She looked into my eyes.

“He’s not.”

 I nodded.

 “He’s not.”

 She kissed my forehead.

 “Come downstairs, Daddy’s putting the news on. We’ll find out, okay?”

 I nodded again.

 “Okay.”

 She took my hand, led me downstairs. I followed her numbly, the situation still seeming so incredibly surreal to me. Sam and Dad were putting on CNN in the living room, Dad’s mouth set in a grim line and Sam’s face etched with worry. I couldn’t even imagine what my face must have looked like. We sat on the couch, me in the middle of Ma and Dad, Sam on the floor against my knees. On the screen, images were flickering.

 I must have watched quite a few news reports on plane crashes before. The images were familiar – singed orange life jackets, charred masses of metal, fire, turbulent water, screaming passengers. But then I realized, as I sat with my family, that every news story is so much more than just a news story to thousands of people everywhere. It was news of a loved one, or many loved ones, on the plane that crashed or the bank that was hijacked or the train that derailed. I did not see Luke’s face show up on the screen, amongst the footage of screaming passengers and rescuers pulling them out of the water. I saw a mother and her daughter, who still had her soaked purple and pink backpack, crawling onto a lifeboat, I saw middle-aged men in suits, I saw a hippie girl in a tie-dye shirt, I saw a fat Indian guy, and I didn’t see Luke. And even though I was thinking he’s okay, he’s okay, I knew in the back of my mind that there was a huge chance that he wasn’t. And that chance scared me, went beyond scaring me, it paralyzed me to the extent that I didn’t know what I’d do. And so I didn’t think about it – but not thinking about something doesn’t make it go away.

 The death toll was at seventeen. Everyone was injured in some way. Seventy-two were majorly injured. And three were missing. The landing had apparently been fishy – it was only a double engine failure so the captain didn’t have to execute a water landing. The newsreader was saying something like corporate conspiracy and undergoing investigation but I didn’t give a fuck about corporate conspiracies so I didn’t listen to her, I just wanted to know if Luke was okay, I just wanted to see his face on the screen.