To Ride A Jet-Powered Broomstick

When I was growing up my mom hated planes. In fact, to this day she wouldn’t even drive me to the airport. We drove everywhere, every family vacation was a road trip kind of vacation. When I was a sophomore in high school my choir class took a trip to Boston, Mass. and rode a bus for 27 hours to get there. I had gotten pretty lucky, in my dated opinion, that the occasion never arose to have to ride in a plane.

In my brain, a plane could just fall right out of the sky. One wrong twitch of the wrist of the captain and we would free fall. I imagined take off being like a rocket, straight up and making your stomach twist around your spine from the pressure. In my mind riding a plane felt like walking on a tight rope 30,000 feet in the air, don’t look down or you’ll get dizzy and fall. I used to think I was afraid of heights, but I have stood on a mountain and felt awe, I have danced at the edge of a cliff and felt freedom. So why, when my friend asked me to fly out to see her for her birthday, did my heart skip a beat and my stomach drop?

I took a moment to respond to her when she asked. Can’t I just drive? But then I thought, “Maggie, this is the adventure you’ve been craving. Adventure literally called you up and said ‘get in bitch we are going to the beach’ and you are hesitating? Swallow that fear. This is exactly what you need.”

And so I said yes. I had three weeks to stress about the plane, how to get to the airport, what the airport would be like, and all sorts of other things my brain could think up including the fact that there is a LITERAL pandemic happening. The more I thought about the imminent danger the more I craved more. What else could we get into while we are on vacation? The anxiety turned into excitement.

The day came to grab my bag and head out the door. I took an hour and a half long shuttle to the airport. When we arrived I expected my heart to be slamming against my rib cage, but I felt as fine as if I had done this a thousand times. I stood up straighter, thanked my driver, and swung open the doors in front of me with confidence. This was it. I was doing the damn thing. It was emptier than I expected it to be, I expected people to be buzzing about all over the place. I saw maybe five people on my way to the check-in. A casualty of the virus, I’m sure.

I found my airline and stood awkwardly at the kiosk, unsure if this was where I was supposed to be. I looked around to try to find someone else who was also checking in to cheat off of. From behind me a short man with dark hair wearing a blue shirt with buttons and pins all over and black pants asked me if I needed help. I assumed he was with TSA, but what the heck do I know. I told him I was here to check in and he helped me through the whole process. Then, he pointed me towards security. I thanked the nice man and wondered why everyone was so afraid of airport TSA. He seemed nice to me *shrug*.

There was no line when I got to security, though from the maze of black tape I deduce that that’s not usually the norm. I showed them my ID and my boarding pass, they asked me to take my mask off to show that my face matched the picture on the ID, and motioned for me to move ahead. I came to a conveyor belt and stood awkwardly once more, unsure of what to do now. Another man in a blue shirt came over to me and asked, “Any liquids, electronics bigger than a cell phone?” and grabbed a tray for me to put my items in. “Sorry, I’ve never flown before, I don’t know what to do,” I told him. He smiled at me and asked where I was headed. “Florida. It’s my best friend’s birthday,” I replied. He asked me to put my shoes and purse in the bin and pointed towards the scariest looking machine I have ever seen in my entire life. Two TSA agents were on the other side of it motioning for me to come through.

“Everything out of your pockets? Are you wearing a belt? Okay, put your feet on the yellow marks there and raise your arms. Don’t move,” they told me. I heard a whooshing noise and that was it, they motioned for me to exit the scary robot contraption. I grabbed my luggage from the conveyor belt and continued on down the hall. I checked my boarding pass for my gate and was quickly able to locate the hallway I needed thanks to large and clear signage.

I expected TSA to be scary, and to take a long time. For some reason in my head I imagined them having to take everything out of my bags and search every nook and cranny for explosives, but turns out they have nifty machines that do all of that for them, and it maybe took four minutes from the beginning of the belt to the end of the whooshing sound in the scary machine.

I sat down in a really uncomfortable chair near my gate. People were supposed to be social distancing, but there just weren’t enough chairs. I wore my face mask the whole time, because pandemic and also because I felt like if I didn’t people were staring at me. By the end of the day my face was quite literally a hot mess.

Suddenly, there were a ton of people that seemed to come out of the walls. I sat for over an hour waiting for my flight. When it was time to board I got my pass ready. I expected butterflies, but none came. From out the window, I saw a plane taking off and it was going so fast down the runway. I remembered that in a few minutes that would be me inside a plane like that taking off just like they did. And that was when I got some butterflies.

I walked down the tunnel, into the plane, found my seat and put my carry on in the compartment above. I was sitting in the middle between two guys probably around my age, but I never found out because all of us sat in silence for the entire two-hour flight. I was bummed that I didn’t get the window seat on my first trip. I remember the plane being much smaller than I had imagined it would be. From what I had seen on TV there should have been three rows and two aisles instead of two rows and one aisle. I expected a cart service with wine. My flight didn’t even have cart service due to Covid-19. I remember admiring the flight attendants’ uniforms, they seemed so elite. The seat in front of me had a screen and a place to plug in a USB. When it was nearly time to take off, a video played on the screen about plane safety and how to use oxygen masks, life vests, and emergency exits. This video did not help my butterflies. I began to wonder how often those things were checked. I thought about what would happen if we did crash. I looked around at all the people on the plane and wondered if these were the people I would die with, and oh my goodness did my imagination take off.

We taxied around for a while and I thought, “Oh this isn’t so bad. I’m okay with this. I could pretend I’m riding a really big bus.”

Then, the plane got loud. Jets fired up and we began zooming through the runway. Take off was not at all what I had expected. I watched out the window as the plane left the ground. I felt my back being pressed against my seat, I chewed gum to keep my ears from exploding. I had to look away from the window eventually. When I looked back out the window later all I could see was blue sky and a few clouds. My whole body felt jittery. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It didn’t scare me that we were 35,000 feet in the air. It didn’t scare me to think about falling, and suddenly I realized that the pilot of this plane knew what he was doing. He had probably flown a thousand planes and if anything happened I trusted the pilot to keep us safe. I laughed at myself a bit for thinking planes were so finicky. They wouldn’t send hundreds of flights out a day if they were as temperamental as I had believed they were. I had been so worried about what-ifs. Turns out, I could have stayed in the sky all day.

The landing was a bit different of an experience. It took around a half-hour to actually get on the ground after the pilot came on the speakers and told the flight attendants to prepare for landing. The plane moved side to side like a swinging pendulum until we were sideways in the sky, diving towards the ground. I clenched my eyes closed and waited for the plane to right itself while I held my breath. Every now and then it felt like we were being dropped straight down and my stomach would do a flip and I would grip the seat in front of me. The worst part of all was when the plane touched the ground, it was bumpy and the sound the wheels made as it scraped the pavement will forever be burned into my ears.

Turns out, I knew nothing about flying. All of the things I was afraid of and that kept me from doing this sooner were not actually things at all. The plane didn’t take off straight up like a rocket making my stomach wrap around my spine, planes are not tightropes, pilots know what they are doing. Planes don’t just fall out of the sky. I am glad that my first experience on a plane was a positive one, because what is a witch without the courage to fly her broomstick? I feel like I can go anywhere now as if this one experience opened a whole hallway of doors to unknown adventures. I am proud of this version of me. I’ve worked hard to build a life I am proud of, and this week I have fallen in love with the life I am living as a witch who finally picked up my broom and left the heavy piece of myself behind that had been weighing me down for so long. I am free, and I am finally awake.

Here’s to courage, adventure, and loving yourself. Where to next?