New York, New York
The plane rocked violently thousands of feet in the air. I clutched my armrest, bit my tongue, and patiently waited for my demise. I had come to terms with it – death was inevitable.
I cringed as I felt the plane drop weightlessly a few feet. A little girl sitting about three rows before me threw up her hands and laughed as if she were riding a rollercoaster. The poor child did not understand the gravity of the situation.
“Dear God,” I whispered from my seat in the back of the doomed aircraft. “Thanks for allowing me to live a good life. I’m not mad at you or anything – I had to die sometime. I just ask that it would be quick. You know how much I hate pai –”
The plane shook and fell once more, causing a number of passengers and even one of the flight attendants buckled in behind me to gasp. Although the thought was morbid, I couldn’t help but wonder if the next drop would be the one that sent us plummeting at spine-shattering speeds to a fiery death.
The plane was silent. All the chatter had died down and was replaced with grave expressions and knowing glances. The plane stayed stable for a few moments, then began to rattle viciously, signaling the end. I closed my eyes and prepared myself.
The plane hit the ground thunderously, slid for a bit, and skidded to a halt.
I opened my eyes. I was still alive. The passengers began to clap. I looked out the window expecting to some kind of grassy plain that we might have crash-landed in, but found an airport runway and a city silhouetted in the distance instead.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot said over the intercom. “Welcome to New York.”
Did that capture your attention?
I hoped it would as I scribbled it into a notepad somewhere over Detroit. Although it made the guy sitting next to me a bit uncomfortable, writing about the event that initialized my fear of planes kept me from freaking out as I flew home for Christmas Break.
While I was changing planes, I made the most interesting discovery: New Yorkers are easy to spot. When I boarded the plane from Chattanooga to Detroit, everyone was extremely nice. Strangers helped each other with luggage, then sat and got to know each other. For a majority of the plane ride, the voices of happy travelers filled the fuselage.
When I boarded the plane from Detroit to New York, however, the environment changed entirely. As I walked past the first class section, a group of people in business suits scowled at me as to say, “I have to ride with that?” As I shuffled farther into the plane, I found that everyone was looking in random directions to avoid eye contact. I could tell because avoiding eye contact was exactly what I did during my first two weeks at Southern. The plane defined everyone’s stereotypical view of New York so much that I began to smile (which no one else was doing either).
Being at Southern for so long definitely changed me. When I got off the plane, I found that I could not stop myself from nodding at people or saying hello. Since making eye contact was a sin in itself, greeting someone was an abomination. Half the people I greeting looked at me funny, while the other half looked like they were cornered and didn’t know what to do. One lady returned my greeting warmly, but she, of course, had a southern accent.
From the moment I boarded the New York bound plane, I had a smile plastered on my face. While living in such a literally and figuratively cold environment might not be an attractive option to most, three words kept prancing around the back of my mind: Home Sweet Home.