It’s 4:12am, the alarm had rung twice now; too lazy to stop the annoying sound—a tone he handpicked so he didn’t get tempted to keep sleeping. A usual recluse, he’d roll over to the other end of the bed, the notepad from last night still laid open, the words that have rampaged his thoughts for nights on end now.
“to picture words without the recluse of sanity;
a throwback from the checks of reality.
the call of the wild, intense yet mild.
who will I be when I wake, eyes wide from the slumber of heartache.
plagued…the thrill of waiting for a change in the scent o’ the air. stale…the stench o’ regret”
Tim is a top notch pilot for a private airline—nerves of steel, occasional miscreant; not the type to be pressed under the proverbial thumb of authority. He understands the hierarchy, he just hates his job, no excuses. He considers himself better than anyone else and would call himself a narcissist if he had the time to check what it meant.
Tim liked to think of everything as a challenge—his relationships, even down to mere acquaintances, everyone he encounters has something he had to fix, a stain he had to wipe clean. Lost in the need to do right no matter how twisted the path had become, little wonder he’s single. Well not exactly, he’s just been too hurt to even notice when love’s pasted in his cockpit windshield, like he should bother about that at 10,000ft in the air. He always wished to be among “The Greats”. Ever since he was little, Tim had always wanted to be really really really good at something, but for now he had a job, and his job demands he be on a plane before 6am.
Reluctantly he steps out of bed and heads for the bathroom, reaches for his toothbrush,” bro you need a shave” he said staring at his reflection, a shave, real bad; strolling around in his ‘birthday suit’, ahhh the single life.
Not too long ago, Mike, his friend concluded Tim was single solely because he wanted to roam his house butt-naked. He’d reply in his defense “Adam was a nudist too, aren’t we like our fathers? and besides he had eve, a total babe . . .the women just can’t handle me”
Forcing open the cabinet drawer next to his bed for the hair clipper . . . “this isn’t just my day”, he mutters to himself. The idle buzzing of the clipper against his face is the only thing to pull him back from thinking about the notepad memo.
It was 04:43am already.
Tim was ready to quit . . . He kept recycling in his head how he’d survive afterwards but it didn’t matter, anything but the daily routine of waking up to follow orders and go back to bed just to do it all over again, this was the last shift, he’d quit and pursue some other fulfilling endeavor; maybe move out of his crummy apartment, heck who knows maybe fall in love, but he still had a job to do and he couldn’t afford to be late.
As he pulled out the drive way, he noticed that of all the times he’d driven to work he never for once looked at the mid-morning/twilight-ish scenery of the sky, little did he know it would be the first… and last time.
30,000ft above Manhattan, the skies weren’t beautiful anymore. Tim fought back the screams in his head. Pulling the controls with all his might, willing the plane to disobey gravity. But his hopes were plummeting fast and so was the plane.
28,250ft…20,000ft…12,000ft… Time cursed the heavens for not having sturdier clouds to hold his plane from crashing. 1,000ft and everything went black, Tim could only picture the sight he had seen earlier. The mist-filled dawn.
Just then…
Impact. And the plane. The passengers. Tim and his dreams went supernova.
I’m a writer when I’m not busy with engineering stuff, I have an unhealthy love for Fanta and dodo even up to combining them, I talk as quickly as I think and I think the garden of Eden was in Black and white
