Zurich and Paris and Oklahoma
It’s basically bedtime, but I’m boarding a plane. Three of us (new Bat Mitzvahs, straddling the gulf between first kiss and first handjob) sit on the floor, next to the gate. Our parents, who triple checked that the crew knows we are unaccompanied, sit with our overstuffed luggage. As if any of us are imagining giving our hosts the slip and taking our chances in Europe.
When we board (coach), we take up the middle seats. I’ve traveled alone before, but never with friends, never at night, and never while on my period. Because my disability’s symptoms worsen with fatigue, the muscles in my neck are lax, begging for sleep. No one has taught me how to take a redeye, or convert my money; I have not mastered any of the skills of international travel. But I am about to float – to fly, perhaps – between continents.
The cabin lights dim. The dark separates us from the strangers, each other, and then the Earth. We lift off, and the plane tips from side to side, like how a toddler wobbles. My friends sleep, on either side. I fidget, and dig into my bag for the portable CD player and headphones.. What did I leave in here? Ah, the new Duran Duran. I press play, and we are in motion together as I try to unwind. In a few weeks, Alanis Morissette will release Jagged Little Pill, and my world will spin differently. For now, I listen to the entire album, trying to hear myself.
Halfway between New York and Zurich, I sleep poorly. There’s no chop up here, but the loneliness of being fourteen presents a gravitational pull that no plane can ignore. We will soon land unharmed, and be delivered into the custody of our friend and her parents, expats who have invited us for the spring holidays. I don’t ski with the others in Zurich – my eyesight has relegated me to round-trips on the chair lift, but I do, briefly, enjoy the tilt of ascent, the flight of falling.
We arrive in Paris, by train, on the afternoon of April 19, 1995. In the station, commuters stare
at the news on glowing screens. A federal building appears, hollowed out, and refilled with carnage. A fireman pauses, surveying the temper of death on a baby, still wearing her socks. We haven’t gotten to the Eiffel Tower yet, but I wish, desperately, to be flying home.
Amy Cook is an MFA candidate at Pacific Lutheran University (Rainier Writing Workshop), and participated in the 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has been featured in more than two dozen literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, great weather for MEDIA, The Other Journal, and Apricity Press. She was a finalist for the 2023 ProForma competition (Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts), a finalist for the Disruptors Contest (TulipTree Publishing, 2021), a semi-finalist for the 2022 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize, and received an Honorable Mention from the New Millennium Writing Awards (2022). She is a reader for the literary magazine CRAFT.