the blueshift journal

next: sole morte, 1987 - 1993

My mother never stops talking about the plane that
almost crashed into the Hudson River eight years ago
but didn't. My mother never stops talking about how
clever the pilot was, how he rescued so many people.
This is why they've been analyzing the crash for so long,
she says, because everyone needs to learn how to
fix themselves. So that they don't drown next time.
My mother never talks about the geese.
They were a confounding variable, they don't count,
she would say, as long as the pilot could avoid them
next time, since he knows to be more careful now.
Except I've always been careful, and I've always been
watching birds, watching out for birds; in a past life
I was an engineer who built a plane that had never
crashed, and in another, I was a pilot whose plane
had never fallen; but I'm not so sure how long that'll last
now because the winters are getting shorter, and
the geese are staying up north longer, and
confounding variables are always out of your control.
The original Hudson had sailed across an ocean
in a boat built on dreams and the pride of a country
fueling the journey, but had ended up being cast from
his ship by his own crewmates in an act of mutiny, and
had learned that you could never trust your luck too much.
A friend suggested that even though the pilot had
succeeded in landing on the river unscathed and alive,
all of the passengers still probably knew how to swim.
They called it the "Miracle on the Hudson," but I know that
miracles never come without a price and there's
no such thing as a body of water that nothing has ever
drowned in before. What I'm trying to say is that miracles
are alright if you're willing to wait for time to collect later,
because there is always a skeleton dissolved in the water —
after all, why else would we call them bodies?
In a past life, I lived in the sky and learned to love flying,
but in this life, I am afraid of heights and study numbers
because I know that you can't count on planes or miracles
to keep away the birds and that if there is anything I believe
in anymore, it's that even if you ever want to save yourself,
you've still got to learn how to swim.