The shadows stared back.
The plane lost all power; we are 31,000 feet in the air, and the nearest airport is still over 200 miles away, and that distance is impossible to cover in an Airbus A320.
I’m just a passenger, a traveller alone in a world that’s about to end. I hear the engine on the left spool down, followed by the right, followed by the power in the plane. No one in the cabin reacted to the sound of the engines disappearing; everyone onboard knew they were probably going to die, silently putting on their oxygen mask, an action that I did not bother to do. It doesn’t matter how safe aviation gets; ignorance, unexpected conditions, and human error could all doom a full aeroplane’s worth of people.
People with families travelling together hugged each other for one last embrace before everything is going to go dark. Dark like the deepest corner of a room, like the hole left in my heart because I never knew what happened to my biological parents.
As the aeroplane dropped about 1,000 feet per minute, I reflected on my life. I wondered about all of the people that would surround the crash site, crying that they had lost a loved one. Who was going to cry for me? I don’t think anyone would come. My parents died a long time ago, before I even remembered their faces or names. I was found by the neighbours and sent to an orphanage. I remember being adopted from family to family. I either had abusive guardians or my odd behaviour got me kicked out. That kept me from staying.
Growing up, I had two friends who both had missing parents. We were all extremely quiet but did well in school. We always got suggestions from teachers who told us to speak more often, but we never changed.
My first family
My adoptive mother was nice. She worked a night job, so I barely got to see her awake. She would leave cookies on my bedside table and say nice things to me when she was awake; her kindness is a nice juxtaposition to the abuse from my adoptive father. I tried to always catch her awake, but my efforts barely did anything because I had school. I love her and will always love her.
My first adopted dad hated me; I would be locked in a room only to get out for school or do chores. If anything in the slightest was wrong, he would yell at me, hit me, and even use a knife to cut me. My terrified self hid in the corner of my room. I got used to it eventually; I wouldn’t even look at him when he yelled at me; I stared past him and looked into the shadows of the room. It stared back. Once it did, the beating I received wouldn’t hurt. Thus, slowly, I stopped caring. My adoptive father liked seeing me suffer, so when I stopped caring, he sent me back to the adoption centre for “bad behaviour and self-mutilation”.
When the adoption centre saw my scars, they called CPS. They found nothing about the man—no drinking habits, no drug abuse, and no severe mental disorders. I wanted my revenge, but I loved my adopted mother too much and didn’t want to ruin a happy family, so I said I did it to myself. That is when the shadow started to talk to me. What it said to me didn’t matter; what mattered was that people thought I was crazy. Schizophrenia, they said, was my condition. I was sent to therapy because they thought I was a threat to myself. I was prescribed dopamine blockers to try to fix my “problem”. However, I knew that the shadows were not a mental fabrication but a natural phenomenon. The shadows didn’t go with the medicine; the medicine only made me depressed, so I refused to take any more after my first dose.
I stopped talking to people; I just talked to the shadows. That is when my friends changed too, sadness burrowed into our eyes.
I’m on this plane to head to college, paid for by my new parents, but now I don’t think I will live to see myself in college. I don’t know my family enough for them to miss me, I don’t think.
Just 10,000 feet above the ground now, I can see the outline of the mountains.
I have no regrets about dying here; maybe I’ll see my biological parents in the afterlife. What would the afterlife be like? Would I be a spectre? Would I go to heaven or hell? What would it feel like to fly the plane right now? These questions flooded my head as we dropped ever closer to the ground.
6,000 feet above the ground, the plane makes a left bank towards a river. We were going to land there. Would I be killed instantly, or would I slowly drown? Would the engines rip the plane apart when the two giants swallow the water?
4,000 feet from the ground, I can see the tree line now. I looked at the shadows the trees created; they stared deep into my soul. They climbed inside the hole in my chest, and I could feel their presence.
Suddenly, the plane’s engines roared back to life, and the cabin’s lights came back on. The passengers in the cabin cheered. At that moment, I gave a slight smile, something I had not done in years. I didn’t smile because I wasn’t going to die; I didn’t care about that.
I smiled because now I knew for a fact that the shadows were real.