I know when I’ve drifted off. And it only happens on planes. My doctor says it’s the altitude, when if first happened I thought I’d was the food. I firmly believe that the food I eat is the key player in my dreams. I worry sometimes- the lady next to me is staring: that idiot with an accent two rows back on the left, i haven’t looked. “I don’t like flying”, “but it’s just a case of not thinking about it”, “don’t think about it”.

He’s quiet now. It’s mostly quiet in the cabin, I think I heard a scream and that’s what woke me.

40000ft and the earth at

Our feet, chasing the night from east to west and my headache has just got worse.

The light above my head is on, and the fan, and the assistance button. I look two people over and out the oval porthole – it’s purple and dark blue all across the outside sky. Like a new bruise. The night screams towards us, drumming with little jolts of turbulence. The wings exhale. He’s not in my vision now, people important to me aren’t in my proximity. Boggling ju-ju eyes slip behind lidded resolve. The shortest blink is the longest eternity. Black bringing with it a timeless clarity. Granular noise begins to infiltrate- like static my mind. Flashes, a blue body squirms, sweat soaking the sheets. Fabric clings to his body, as he tries to roll breathe into his lungs. They’ve filled with water as if underwater. I can’t close my eyes or look away, I am omniscient and all bearing. The blue red deepens, my chin shakes. A blister of sorrow has popped in the back of my throat. I can’t speak, only taste sick and watch. The last decompression was a minute ago, he’s stopped tossing back and forth- so peaceful now. All the space in his body now brims with the incorrect distributions of water. Cancerous? Psychosomatic- cause and effect? I look at my palms, shakingly they scrunch into fists. If I wasn’t Hesse, if I’d somehow never heard about it, then it wouldn’t have happened. Not in my mind, but here I am, and there flies the soul of my lost kin.

I’m screaming with 5 strangers pinning me down when I awake. Later they’ll tell me that I tried to perform CPR on the person next to me while they slept. They fear me as they should, I can’t sleep anymore, not since I lost him. My blue eyes remind me of him. An unsafe, dying colour. Makes me choke up, tears pool like the hypothermic lungs of the lost. Like all lost souls, they don’t stop wandering, from there they continue on, crawling, walking, flying away from me, from us all. The escape artist revealed in death. I was there for it all, watching the spirit flicker all the whole through unblinking eyes. All my tool for naught. Poison bubbles in my heart and the pit of my stomach. Hands cuffed to my seat, trying not to sleep, unblinking. Hopeless defeats pinned to me, to all of us. Our defunct bodies. Worms, pale sick and waterlogged.