Crash

He had heard it said that when you are about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. Fragments of your past come before you and dance like long forgotten dreams, taunting you as you remember all the things you will miss about living. He saw and felt none of this, however. All he saw was the future: the mountain straight ahead of him. All he felt was alone, or at least, almost alone.

He could feel the heat from the fire rising closer to him. He wasn't sure what would make the plane's engine just explode like that, but it apparently was possible. He wondered if anyone who found the wreckage would be able to figure it out. With a sigh he simply shook his head. If he had learned one thing from this whole ordeal, it was that things often did not make any sense.

He glanced over at the pilot seat, to the unconscious man sitting beside him. The passenger almost felt sorry for that man. "The one thing that all binds us together is death," he thought, "and this man will never get to experience what that really feels like. He will just open his eyes in a few moments and be somewhere else, and who knows if he will ever really understand what happened."

As for the passenger himself, he knew exactly what was about to happen, and was sure that the act of it happening would not make him forget. He stared ahead again, at the tree topped mountain which was even more rapidly approaching. He knew enough about airplanes that if he really wanted to, he might be able to make some attempt to save them, but he knew, deep in his heart, that all that would do was delay the inevitable. He was going to die no matter what he did, and not just sometime in the future, he was going to die today, in the next few moments.

The man did not want to waste those moments trying to save himself. He wanted to savor them, not by dwelling on the past or on what the future could have been, but on the present, on this very moment. It really was a beautiful view. He had been in airplanes many times before, but never had he felt so high and yet so low. He felt like he could reach out and touch the trees, and yet they seemed a million miles away.

"Oh well," he thought with a slight smile, "I'll be right in the thick of them soon enough," and he almost, almost laughed to himself.

As his smile continued to grow he closed his eyes, breathed in the smoke from the burning engine, which was strangely relaxing, and waited for what was to come. He was not afraid. He knew what was coming. After all, his entire life had led him to this moment, this beautiful, perfect, regret-free moment.

And now, the memories tried to come, but he blocked them out. He didn't want them to come. He had had his entire life to think about them. He didn't want to waste more time on them now. He folded his hands over his chest, let the rest of his body to go limp, and waited for the crash that he knew was to come any second.