you must continue to exit

The nausea is overwhelming—it has been like this for months, your body rebelling everytime you board a car or train and now an airplane. You have barely started the taxi process and your hands are already gnarled with silent pain under your coat. No one else needs to see such physical defeat so early in the journey.
You briefly consider taking out the barf bag in the seat pocket. How often were people throwing up in aircraft that they made having one mandatory in every plane? Did it used to be so jarring that enough stomachs emptied themselves every single flight? And now you yourself are considering using it all those years later.
You could buy inflight wifi just to check the answer, but for a two-hour-trip-including-takeoff, it feels frivolous, so you release your grip on the phone in your pocket. His last text burns your fingers through the metal body and plastic case as it has all day.
Instead, you ask the flight attendant for a can of sparkling water when she comes around—not a cup, but a can—because your stomach hurts. She glares at you but makes a note on her pad before moving onto the old lady with blue hair next to you who requests a ginger ale in a cup, not a can, with ice. She is an easy customer. You remember she was wheeled onto the plane by a Hispanic kid who was texting the whole time and ran over a bump in the carpet. She nearly fell.

8:31pm: you are so loved, do you know that?
You are so loved, do you know that?
Eight words, eight different sentences.

From an airplane window, everything else comes to a halt. There are no waves on the ocean anymore, just white, unmoving lines. You could try to spot your house from the air, but it is so stationary you could not find it with a magnifying glass. You can blink and you are 10 miles further, but still in the exact same spot. And then another plane flies below you and you realize they are also going 575 miles per hour, or perhaps faster, but in the other direction, of course, or else you would crash.
And you’re that plane for someone else above.
And you’re all in the clouds and no one from the ground can see any of this whatsoever. Kids think you’re shooting stars.
And before you know it your mask is wet. Fat tears force their way out of your eyes and thick streams of mucus threaten to exit your nose. You are leaking. Despite the plentiful oxygen on board you cannot breathe. There is nothing you want more than to quiet the roaring inside and outside your head and you wonder what it would mean to jump out of the tiny pressure release hole in the plane window and breathe in the ice crystal shards stored in the clouds around you. So refreshingly they could burn your throat. You are delirious.
You wonder if the masks they keep in the ceiling compartment would help you better inhale this stale air, and then reason they might not even work anymore, depending on the last time anyone has ever had to use these. Or maybe the barf bags could do the trick.
Help yourself first and then others.
What about the kids?
There is a ding from the row behind you. The flight attendant from before circles back with a napkin in her pocket, the same pocket that held your begrudgingly rewarded soda water that sits unopened on your tray.
Whipping around to see the bell ringer, you see a man shrug and give a soft smile, one you cannot return under your damp mask. Before, you would think he was cute and strike up a conversation. Maybe you’d get married. But now your face is covered in saline and you can see his face which means he is not wearing a mask and does not care about helping his fellow man avoid a deadly virus anymore, which means he too would leave you at the altar someday anyway.
Blue Hair Lady reaches over and clasps your hand, an invasion of space akin to a stabbing.
“It’ll be alright, dear,” she says, voice cheerful and unburdened by the crush of loss. How do you know what she’s been through? You bitch. Of course she has felt what you do, the sand that weighs down your lungs, the angular block of dread that has cemented itself in your throat since last Monday. She is a million years old. What hasn’t she felt?
No. No one will ever be as sad as you are right now.
She is about to say something else when the plane takes a plunge and she gasps. Her sunglasses tilt slightly forward on her nose. The top of your hand feels cold when she pulls back to grasp her rosary necklace and cover her eyes again, in that order. You want to give her the same comfort she attempted to bestow earlier, but it is too late. And your own stomach has started turning again, bile rising to cover your tongue and prevent another thought from leaving your face.
“It’s just turbulence,” the woman says over the engine’s reverberations. “How great is our God.”