Flying and Friends, or flying with friends.

Flying
for the first time
is like a roller coaster
but a thousand times more
terrifying.

I hate roller coasters.
They make my hands shake
and my stomach hurt.
I don't feel well or safe for hours
after I've ridden one. There is
no room for them in my head.

But flying
is like five hundred roller coasters
as your stomach drops and you see
your line of vision shift
and you feel gravity change
but the wind doesn't hit your face
and you can hear people laughing around you
and the voices of your friends telling you
it is okay
we are safe
this is good

There is comfort in my friends.
We laugh about books and how the ground looks
different and we speculate about where we are and how
glad we are that the flight is only 3 hours long, tops.
We argue over what to drink on the plane and
I am grateful at how much they make me laugh
in the midst of new terror.
How looking through the Skymall magazine
makes things feel normal and joking about wanting
scotch at 7 am makes you Hemingway, and not even slightly
an alcoholic.
The taste of fear, when I'm with my friends,
goes from entirely bitter
to sweet and sour
because even though my stomach hurts
it is because I'm laughing with them.

We fill three hours up so quickly
because we laugh and we read and
complain about the horrors of technology
and on the way back, I'll order a drink
that will probably live in infamy as long as we are friends.
There will always be something
so homey
about travelling with friends.