Airports and airplanes always give me a sense of new beginnings. The moment an airplane takes off, gravity changes and pseudo force pushes us back to the seat. Then the flight continues. Everything seems like a celebration with happy stewards walking across the plane, asking if everything is okay. Sometimes a hard turbulence may strike and suddenly everyone is praying for their lives, remembering good old moments, clutching the armrest of their seats really tight. And as the plane stabilizes, sighs fill up the surroundings, and we breathe the same air that once went through our lungs in anxiety.
When the plane lands, gravity changes again and at the moment of touchdown, our feet float and we are pushed ahead, away from our seats. I see beauty in that. For that’s how my sadness has been for me. Always changing gravity, pushing me to the edge sometimes or making me float in nostalgia otherwise. My sadness celebrates all the happy moments with a thin stretched smile on the face, almost artificial robot like. And on the days it cannot, it leaves my body on autopilot, letting it find its own course until it regains control again. On such days I feel happiness like turbulence strike me and I, afraid of getting uprooted, hold my arms real tight until the butterflies in my veins rest. Sometimes sadness become the last passenger to board this body and my body like a good airline, doesn’t take off without it.
Yet it is rewarding, this journey. We have flown across various oceans of grief, where clouds huddled together to form a lake, making me want to jump off the plane and free fall till this weightlessness made sense to my heavy sadness. Airports seem like a celebration of separation, with wide tall ceilings looking down on us as our only gods who listen to the love that floats in air like air. We breathe in memories, nostalgia, separation anxieties and meetings after years and months all in a single breath. What I mean to say is, sadness is the airport outside which I leave my body and enter with a boarding pass of grief. When I say I love travelling by air, I mean I do not want my body back.
There is magnificence in sadness. I romanticize sadness for it has given me wings to fly. You see I have been scared of travelling by bus alone all my life but when I took my first flight, I felt liberated. What I mean is, I will always, always choose sadness over anything. And when you ask me about the loneliness, I simply say, bad food can still fill your empty stomachs. This is not to say I have forgotten walking. But I walk with a slight jump to it, as if my body tries to take off even on uneven land. That if you walk with me, chances are I will collide with you several times. So, before you ask me why don’t I get out of that bed again, know that sometimes these wings get too heavy to carry the weight of this light life. But there is a security to my sadness, I will always leave behind some memories for people to love me as if they are seeing me for the last time. I am not pathetic for love, I just don’t know when this body will crash. On a good summer day or a foggy winter day, but whenever it does, it sure will leave behind remnants of tragedy that would bring change perhaps to the idea that sadness is beautiful and in this I find peace.
“Who cares if I can fly or not, I will land on muddy seas and float through the infinities to reach where my heart resides. In the cracks of a broken heart, you will find me and I will be smiling.”