Bjork - Aeroplane

we catch aero planes and ascend the sky while never moving, we learn the brace position as clouds are sucked into engines and the lights that will light our way in the event of an emergency seem to glow with the promise of disaster. but only if you pray hard enough. I look out my window which has rounded edges, because corners catch and cause crashes, and two layers of fibre plastic glass which have tiny spider webbed splinter like cracks which seem to emerge somewhere between 15,000 and 35,000 feet. I watch with dull interest as the cracks seem to grow outwards, and I wonder if falling through clouds would hurt. as I raise my eyes over the chair that sits uncomfortably close to me and I can see rows and rows of heads shifting and turning like flotsam bobbing between waves. I feel confused, as it seems I am going nowhere, each time on a plane is either two things, going to something amazing, or leaving something amazing, and the slice through the sky is dead time in between that is filled with snack boxes and traveltainment. I am not sure when it happened, as I was watching the whole time, but the sky has become darker and the clouds thicker, they look like waves, thick soggy waves, foam, there is no sky between them, we skim along their surface. You cannot comprehend the speed of the plane, but you can feel it, in the pit of your tummy, sucking up hard into your throat as the plane lowers, dropping height even though space holds no value, and the dizzy feeling in your tummy is like the promise of an orgasm in mid air. I watch as we plough through the clouds, they seem like hair perhaps, strands coating the wings of the plane, the clouds shake their crowning glory as the plane explores their folds. out the window now I can see the twinkling lights of your city, I can see your roads and houses as formations of light, light of my life, glowing and pulsing. The blackness in between seems to go on forever, the city floats in the air much like the clouds, I am sure the solidity of life has dispersed quickly in all directions of the universe. I am the only matter. there is no time to think as a twinkle of your eye produces the city and I knock my elbow against the double plane window, I take off my seatbelt despite the lit sign, I swivel in my chair and anchor my back against the armrest, I grit my teeth and bang bang my feet against the window, cracking the plastic, splintering it, and whoosh, here it comes, the air sucks me into your urban nothingness. first my arms emerge from the hole, then my head, and I pull my body long and lean, then my legs eager and heavy and there I am crouching on the wing, the lights in your buildings thrusting to me, your outstretched arms are sky scrapers and my heart explodes. Oh and the spring in my step as I run fast along the wing of the plane, there is no movement but me and the yawning smile of your highways, arms outstretched, eyes wide I jump from the metal wing to the promise of you. down down I fall, and your lights bloom yellow, red and glorious white, the white is the most pure of all, it does not twinkle, it simply ebbs from small to huge as my body falls down to your outstretched arms, your skyscraping fingers, your soft mouth of rivers and the streets that pump your blood and I am only in darkness for a second and I am only whole for a second before the light of your city pierces me through and I sigh with the pleasure of your touch.

About the author:
Marlaina Read has a degree in Visual Arts from the Sydney College of Arts, and during her student years she also spent half of 2004 in Berlin. Photographically, she is interested in the sublime and nothingness, in cinema, in children, in everyday rituals, in places and spaces and memory. She wants to be a teacher and an artist. You can find her online at invisiblecity.org.