Bird Bones

I felt my heart pounding in my chest as the tall gray-haired man, who called himself a pilot, loaded me and my small bag onto the small, rusty plane. I couldn't shake the feeling of unease that gnawed at my gut as he added two jerrycans of fuel to the cargo without tying them down. I wanted to escape, scream, to do anything to avoid getting on that plane. But I said nothing. The pilot closed the door, and the sound of the latch clicking shut made my heart skip a beat.

As we took off, the pilot turned to me and said we might encounter a slight drizzle of rain when we reached the north of Botswana, but most of the way would be smooth and clear. I leaned back into my seat, trying to calm myself, but my hands gripped the armrests until my knuckles turned white.

We flew over a barren Namibia, and all I could see was death. Dead livestock littered the cracked orange ground like little dots on a map, and the fires that stretched and broadened themselves ruthlessly across the earth floor seemed to be the only things alive. The view below did nothing to alleviate my fear of being all the way up here in a plane the size of a small fly.

Adding to my terror was the fact that I didn't know if I would ever see you again. Normally, I would have texted you before takeoff and again when I arrived safely, but this time, you had asked for space to think about us or decide if you were going to get back with her.

I opened the notebook that was clenched between my thighs. The cover was warm and wet, but the inside was dry. The notebook and I had a lot in common.

"My darling man," I wrote, watching my pen bump across the page as our plane did the same. "When I write this, we are both on opposite sides of the world, trying to figure out whether we should be on the same side and share the world. Our story is a special one, but now we are at a crossroads, deciding if it should be a reality or if we just leave it as a story. A beautiful one, that ended with compromise."

I couldn't help but wonder if this was the end. If it was, I had at least written down our story to share it with all the people who might be lucky enough to have felt or feel the way we felt about each other. If this was the end of us, then I would dig this story down somewhere in the desert in Botswana. Maybe one day, the world would need to learn about love, real love. The kind that only a few people experience.

The turbulence increased, and I clutched the notebook to my chest. I felt my body tense as I wrote, "Sometimes I wonder what that means though. And sometimes I wonder if two people can experience the same thing at the same time. Do you remember when we met? On the flight going to South Africa? When I opened the door of the toilet directly in your face because you had forgotten to lock the door? My job already then was to knock some sense into your skull. I loved you already then. It was an unpredictable kind of love, the one that hits you from the side."

Suddenly my thoughts were interrupted by the sight of a massive black cloud straight ahead. I wondered when the pilot would take a left or right to fly around the cloud, but he didn't. Instead, he flew directly into it. The plane dropped violently, and the pilot shouted that he had forgotten to tie down the jerrycans, ordering me to hold them down. Buttons blinked in reds and oranges, and my heart rate spiked to at least 300 beats per minute.

But it was when we dropped so hard that the wheels came out and the pilot had to pump them back in again that I was sure we were going to die. The darkness of the cloud surrounded us, and all I could do was to close my eyes, think of you and the people I love and hold on while we were literally swerving between life and death. The pilot yelled that we had to try and land on the road, and just as he was about to try I miraculously spotted the airstrip.

- There! I shouted. The airstrip is there!

I don’t know how. I must have left my body. But moments later we had we finally landed. The pilot who was drenched in sweat changed his hat and welcomed me to Safari lodge.

He laughed nervously and suggested that maybe a whisky would be wise before continuing an evening of negotiations. You see I was supposed to buy the lodge from him. The liquid flowed down my throat like a dragon’s breath, and I decided in that moment to think of the flight incident as symbol of how much I was willing to go through to make my project happen.

I emptied the glass, dropped off my suitcase and splashed some cold water onto my face. The room and lodge looked as shit as I had remembered it. A dump in the middle of a dump, surrounded by paradise. I mean it says it all when a lodge decides to use band aids to close the holes in the mosquito netting, and use a bathmat as a doormat. But none of this was important, this was not why I wanted the place. I wanted it to help the San people reclaim this too as their paradise.

It’s remarkable how easy it is to undermine and tuck away moments or experiences that shook the soul and carved the stone a bit closer to the skin. How we are raised to not feel proud about achievements, but instead encouraged to be victims of the past instead of heroes of gratitude. A society raising people to think they are weak, instead of reminding you of all the times you were strong. Focusing on the stomach ache, instead of turning pain into spider silk that will weave us back into life. Maybe we all misunderstood what strength really is supposed to be. Humans measure strength by lifting, nature measure strength by the resilience of outlasting. I had survived. I was a bird now. Fit for any flight. Fit for a journey without you. Thank you for the moment of love we shared.

Strength is transparent. Illusive. Birdbones covered in feathers.

Written by: Aleksandra N/aisa Orbeck