Prelude: rushing taxi, kiosk printing, drifted security check-in, pondering in waiting area

Then you take a look at the ticket of your flight and find you have spent 5000 on your expanse flight
but were too meager to spend a 40 on insuring your life, just in a mode of saving with involuntarily
assurance and the confidence that modern convenience has brought upon all our lives. You chuckle
in absurdity and think if you have missed the chance of securing your travel and the bulky Sum
Assured that your family would have got in case of your demise. You wonder if the plane crashes and
none of it makes it alive, what would your wife and kids think about the nothingness and insecurity
you have left behind? Did papa forget to secure her castle and the vehicle of his dreams?

You realise that you don’t have a wife because you lacked the boldness to tell her about how you
feel, and you are a lonely pervert who drains his seeds in fantastic pleasures.

Then you think about your parents. Will you be imposing them with one of the greatest griefs of
losing a grown child who was supposed to take care of them in their old age and trouble, but you left
them behind in their ageing backyard because you sought freedom, knowledge, and happiness, and
moved to the big city to fulfill dreams—only to find yourself waking up everyday in an empty
apartment with dreams crushed by the soceity?

Well, you try to remember the last time you spoke with them, and realise you don’t even know how
they are doing currently. And then, you reckon that it was always they who called, and you didn’t
even bother to talk to them nicely, let aside comfort their ageing, fading mind. YOU’RE A FUCKING
PIECE OF SHIT!! YOU DESERVE TO DIE AND ROT IN HELL!—said the voice inside your head.

You gasped on your choking breath, subsided the eeriee reality, and moved on to stand in just
another line.

And there she stood, clad in red, wearing a smile for which she has been trained—to greet and guide
the passengers to their flight, and verify their journey with a stomping sound of the omnidated
stamp. Well, at least, the airliners have done well in selecting their attendants with the criteria of
beauty and good health, made up with layers of Lakme that she too hurrily put on her skin to even
damage it further, so she would not be too late to cater to her dreams that she is steadily running
away from. And the airliners have done their job well to clad her in red, because they understand
the electromagnetic spectrum of visible light and how red scatters the least among every bright light
and persists visibility even in fog and mist, which is why it was used in war signals, and today it has
become the global symbol to halt and “stop”. Moreover, red is the colour of the mind, a latest
neuroscientific research suggests, as it excites the dopaminergic pathways in your self-pitying brain.

A true nature of existence, you murmured, appreciating her beauty and the genuine smile on her
face. “Too bad its fabricated”, you thought, as you gasp on the realization that you have indirectly
paid for it, and all this experience is included in your flight fare. She hardly caught any of your distnat
words and asked for your ticket without speaking a word. You pass the ticket with clumsy hands but
keep staring into her eyes to seek the justice that you could never find.

“Sorry, sir! You’re in the wrong queue!” she says, as if you understand the philosophy you were
already marred with during the waiting period you could not wait to get out of.

“Which way is right?” you ask hesitantly, as if your brain is still trying to process its hasty myopic
decisions that has led it here. She says, “it’s right here, the one you crossed while coming here”.
The smile on her face has become real now. She folds her directing hand with grace and fronts up
her head to the old lady standing behind you, who is too eager to arrive at her grandson’s wedding,
and can’t wait behind clutter any longer.

You jump off from the queue hastily with your newfound understanding, and rush to the guided gate
to seek clarity. You find there’s no queue, and a middle-aged man with dyed hair humbly greets you.
“Is this terminal 23? Why isn’t there any lit up sign?”, you ask in justice of misguidance. He says, “we
just opened,” reaching up to uncurtain the board that’s got written “Terminal 23” all over it. He
pushes the light to bright it up and utters in resolution: “You’re the first one to arrive”.

A faint light beckons on your soul and with the thundering sound of your ticket verified, you see men
clearing the doors for you, as your steward clears for boarding your flight.

“It’s one of those bellowed collapsible tunnel structures”, you say to yourself, “that leads directly to
the gates of the plane, bypassing all the struggles of boarding buses, windy runways, and unsteady
iron steps with cranky railing bars.”

“Thank god! This feels like it will be good ride”, as you descend with gravity speeding up your long
balancing strides.

As a natural observer of life, you don’t fail to draw an analogy of travelling through tunnels with the
act that started all our lives—the act of birth. Parturition, you recall, when the travailing woman
fulfills the desires of her natural character and provides a new life nourished with her body, soul, and
mind. Too bad, we have no memory of it, as we enter this world crying loudly, because mother was
taking care of me as my organs developed to a certain extent, and at half-decent maturity, the two-
million-year-old biological evolution destined my simultaneous exit and entry to two different
worlds. At this moment of “cut the cord”, the nascent is supposed to function on its own with the
under-developed organs, and as it takes the first breath on its own and activates the pulmonary
aorta to beat its first heart, it screams in pain as it cannot fathom the plethora of surrounding stimuli
—too many and too much at once. Too bad, the parts of our brain responsible for memory—
hippocampus, or more aptly, the parahippocampal gyrus, and the oh-so-enigmatic amygdala—are
still underdeveloped to record this huge burst of stimuli and responses.

“You don’t remember being born, do you?” you ask yourself in attempt to vaguely summarize your
thoughts as you make the fifth descending turn in this oscillating tunnel.

“How much longer?”, you fall impatient, “Well, at least, I won’t be crying out of my way at the end
of this tunnel.” Your lips bend to one side of your cheek as you put up a half-smile in vanity at the
sight of lovely red and yellow ladies waiting to greet the first one home.

You say nothing to them, because you have paid for your inhuman silence toward mate-inciting
greetings that are customized for your generic senses—so much knowledge about humans, and yet
too distant to form humane relationships.

Yet, you let vanity prevail as you stare at the empty boarding plane that has been precisely
manufactured for your comfort with the best materials procured from around the planet, especially
from developing nations with indecent labour laws and cheap import taxes. You hear a distant voice
from the attendants ensuring a concerned customer that the insides of the metal bird has been
appropriately disinfected with extreme-range Ultraviolet radiation of 190 nm discharged by a state-
of-the-art machine called Vulture 203X before it was serviced for operation. A global distinctive
feature in a post-pandemic world, even after five years have passed since the last death accredited
to it.
You secure your hand luggage in the spacious cabin that you can hardly reach; you unbutton your
coat that you have been wearing since the winter began, and you occupy the seat inhaling a fresh
breath of air, closing your eyes in silence. You take the liberty to slightly recline your seat and attain
a superficial leg-space that you didn’t pay extra for. You finally lock in the seat belt as an athletic
head-start move. “Oh, such a bliss!” you exhale as you can’t wait to start a new day, a new life, in
the new promised land you are going to arrive.

But hey! The bird hasn’t flown yet. It’s still on the ground.

You are gonna have to tolerate the excrutiating pain of your fellow passengers crumbling into the
board, as they hit your shoulder with their discounted leather bags with pointy studs pointed right at
you, and you shudder politely with “It’s okay!” even though it’s not. And you’re gonna have to find
way to scramble your seated legs for the testosterone-driven gentleman who won’t even ask you to
shift before he barges in to occupy the dreaded middle-seat without even placing his hand luggage
in the top-shelf, as he spreads his legs and occupies both the armrests by tackling your hand for it.

“I guess he’s got gold in it, or his ultramasculine ego!”, you tell yourself in an attempt of witty fun
that no one understands in your aisle.

You incline away from him as a young bright lad comes up to you and asks for space to occupy his
window seat. You try to get up and make way for the bright lad wearing YNWA merchandise, but
your ahead-of-thought locked-in stance prevents you from standing up, and you fall back on to your
seat, embarrassing yourself in front of the testosterone man who can hardly hide his shady chuckle,
the young guy waiting for his turn from a clumsy dude, and a beautiful lady who just happens to pass
by at the exact right moment in your manifestation of utter disgrace.

“I guess, I was too early”, you state in some kind of retreating pride as you unlock your seatbelt and
finally stand up straight with broad shoulders that gets hit by another man’s luggage from the back.
You shout out a forgiving “It’s okay!”, before realising that the offender hadn’t even sought an
apology for hitting you on the back. You gasp out the excessive kindness you carry for your kind,
without any appraisal from any that surrounds you. And, the young man is stilly carrying the smile
after witnessing this free pre-flight entertainment coming complementary with his flight ticket, but
his eyes are blinking faster than before in awaitance for his deserved occupancy.

So you give way for oxytocin, but the testosterone remains seated with unperturbed spreaded legs.
He dribbles his way through, because he is still young to adapt and swerve his way around the world.

You finally attempt to collect your erstwhile peace and gasp out another breath at the disturbing
smile of the testosterone-driven indicated at you by his peripheral vision. Dominance through non-
verbal attitude at best, they call it, as modern men working as high-end dogs in management display
it a form of volunteered slavery, only to rise out as “superficial alphas” who can’t even handle a
situation beyond their specialized dogmas.

You were anxiously waiting to close your eyes again, but hey, the pilot of the plane is introducing his
number-driven career and reminds you that–it’s time for some dandy dance, baby, by your own
stewardesses who try to act in tandem with the pre=recorded safety and emergency landing speech
that everyone dreads in insecurity. Admit it, everyone is gonna run their shit balls if something
happens, and you won’t even be able to unlock your seat in time, and probably gonna die by
stampede, if not hypoxia or cardiac arrest under hypotension.

Still, you find merry in the dandy dance by the amateur dancers who are exhibiting periodic delays in
their unemotional movements because they didn’t rehearse together and are out-of-sync. You can’t
control your laughter as the alpha beside you is now looking at your long face, realising that he
might face a similar situation while unlocking the seatbelt. The world becomes merry as it rounds up,
you know.

But you keep the smile, because this is the first time this week that you laughed genuinely. You
lower your head in humility and take out the menu booklet that the dandy ladies are luring you with.
You skim through the pages listed with fancy items at overpriced marks, imagining why would you
even buy an iPod mid-air? Anyway, the flight takes off and you intend to recline in peace after the
short-term turbulence that any creature faces before spreading its wings.

But hey! You are optimistic now and your nihilism-accustomed brain is trying to trick some serotonin
as it can’t handle this newfound optimism. So, you instantly make the choice of celebrating (nothing)
with the perfect blend of confident foolishness and hedonistic misery served in a non-glass glass for
mid-air safety (so you don’t stick a shard in someone’s eyes, you know who would that be, or simply
hijack the plane with a broken piece of glass).

“Alcohol”, you cry, as the stewardess greets you with an unbroken smile. She spoils you with the
choices of “Wine or champaigne?”

You choose wine because her voice note slides up from a D to D# on the fourth octave, indicating a
major-7th-to-1 resolution that has always been music to your ears since Ella (Fitzgerald) and Sarah
(Vaughan) engraved it in human history.

With the first sip of this aged drink, you find yourself instantly order two more, because you know
that you are gonna be drinking, even if it tastes like piss.

Every sip reminds you of the pain you have ever had, and how you used to drink to numb the pain
caused by your pre-natal limitations. Although you have surpassed those depriving times now, your
brain convinces you that you deserve this merry, and you have “earned” this pleasure linked with
countless related displeasures.

You succumb to the swipe of your debt-ridden credit card, but the stewardess tells you “Sir, this is
the state-funded credit card given by the government as a measure of Universal Basic Income to
boost local purchase during the long-gone pandemic and to fund your dreams of the higher-
education you never pursued.” You hastily take the worn-out plastic card away from her hand and
proceed to pay directly out-of-pocket with the glossy black platinum card that your debtor has
enshrined you for a being a loyal prick to their vaults.

And now your worthless purchase has freed you to sink into the indulgence of hedonism.

You drink sip after sips till it becomes gulps of drinks down your throat that has been inflammed
beyond repair and the mucous has hardened to protect you from the torture you create everytime
out of it. You can’t fail to notice the uncomfort in the testosterone-driven man at this moment as he
fears he will be the cradle of your vomit mid-air and has folded his mansplaining legs to decrease the
probability of impact based on surface area versus vomit trajectiles calculations. He kind of knows
that if you regurgitate, you’ll choose no one but him as the vomit sink. Too much for peripheral
visions, eh?

Now your head feels heavy and the alcohol concentration in your blood is soaring beyond measures
that the dimensions of mg/dl is not in the correct order of magnitude for accurate reflections of your
serum. Your liver cannot metabolise this blend at the rate you have enforced it to, so it redirects the
blood stream to your brain, which is unfortunately an extraordinary place for alcohol catabolism.
Your cerebellum is now infused with smaller chains of fatty acids and the hypothalamus is super-
engaged in maintaining the homeostasis, so it rushes in every neuroendocrinic signals that it can
think of like a mage under distress: Serotonin, dopamine, endorphin—wait, do we need that one?

Your limbic system is deranged now, and neither your sympathetic nor parasympathetic nervous
system sympathises with you anymore, as you feel the need to talk, to listen, to engage, to release,
and being understood, all occurring simultaneously, to suit the nonsense you are standing at the
brink of. The pilot now announces that the journey is halfway complete and you are gonna reach
your destination sooner than expected. You realise that you have wasted half of your time in
indulging with merry and now you have to repair and prepare everything in half the time you had
earlier. This triggers a further survivalistic rush that is beyond anyone’s control, thanks to our
biological design.

You shudder your shoulders and take a deep breath following your favourite neuropsychiatrist’s
advice on Youtube, who is not even aware of your existence, let aside the underlying conditions,
because bling.

So, you decide to take fresh breaths of air at 33000 feet above datum, try to self-analyse yourself,
and release the existing nitrogenous wastes accumulated by your body during this air travail. Yeah,
travailing, indeed.

So, you clumsily open your seatlock, and this time, it open fluently with grace. You stride out with
sheer confidence toward the lavatory and notice your attendant smiling at your condition—too
happy for the incentive she’ll get because you have helped her cross her flight’s consumerism target.

You enter the lavatory and immediately open the water tap, even before closing back the door and
catch a concern glance from the now-curious attendant. You slam your face with water but your
hands are not in great control, and you open your eyes with your hands still clutching your face
beneath the nose, and you see fractals floating on the metal basin.

You raise your head in shock and stare at the mirror and the realisation prevails: “Life is just as a
fractal that continuously projects itself at every scale. Our state at every moment, our actions of
every day, and our motivation across every year project our lives outward on ourselves. It’s the same
thing that repeats itself at every scale. Our appearance, our thoughts, our actions, and our
perseverance makes us who we are. So, act now, you fucking bastard. It’s been a decade since you
became an adult.”

You step back involuntarily at the displeasure of this realisation and hit your blunt elbows on the
soap dispenser placed on the opposite wall. You spout an “ouch!” in reflex, but the concerned
attendant still waiting outside only hears a loud thud and a painful ouch. She immediately shouts
back, “Sir, is everything alright?”. You reply with fake grace, “Yeah, I am alright!”.. although, clearly,
you’re not!

In time, you arrange yourself as every conscious human does and partly sober up before leaving the
lavatory, in front of which the stewardess was leaning to gauge the situation. You ask her now “Is
everything alright?”, and she murmurs with an affirmative tone that you don’t bother to listen to
anymore.

You know where your seat is, and you feel extremely confident regarding your placement with
relation to your surroundings. You pull your chin up and in a conscious attempt to gauge your
surroundings (that you are now the king of), you see that bright young lad by the window seat
capturing frames from top of clouds. He finishes his surmounting task of capturing the best frame he
is gonna post on his social platforms even before leaving his seat. And as he proceeds to edit his
frames with mediocre filters, you ask him, “First time flying, eh?” He affirms with his current glee,
and continues his verb with casual interrogation: “Where are you headed?”

You are slightly taken aback because this is a one-way non-stop journey and everyone aboard is
directed towards the same destination. So you lean back with pleasure and cunningly reply, “Same
as you, boy! Same as you.”

Notwithstanding, his head or glance doesn’t shift, as if it was an incorrect answer and you didn’t get
the meta-reality of his subtle interrogation. You swiftly veer your head in avoidance and finally get to
your peace..

But the words keep floating in the inner screen of your eyes just as that major 7th note lingering
towards resolution towards fulfillment:

“Where are you headed?”