Sawadee Ka Devin,

I’m cruising at 36,000 feet at approximately four-hundred miles per hour. The plane is halfway to Seattle from Seoul in the middle of the pacific. I’m riding comfort class. I have extra leg room and a few more amenities than the plebs in coach. This is the first flight I have been on since I have traveled South East Asia where I haven’t had a panic attack. I never used to be afraid of flying. It started last summer after you died. The family and I went to Hawaii for a week and on the return flight, at takeoff, I was overcome with the most powerful sensation, and what felt like intuition, that the plane was going to crash and that everyone aboard was going to die. It took everything in my power to keep me from screaming prophetic warnings to the vulnerable children and families encased in the metallic bird. What I wanted to do was run to the front of the plane, burst into the cockpit, grab the pilot by the face and say, “This plane is definitely crashing!” I realized, however, that causing a scene based on a feeling may not be the most sensible or considerate thing to do. I should have just asked my neighbor if they would hold my hand.

Rather than sending the planes climate into pandemonium, I turned inward. I bottled up the overwhelming sensation that my death was immediate. It’s amazing what happens to the body when adrenaline kicks in. My perception of physical reality began to shimmer, warp, and bend as my brain flooded with chemicals. My stomach sank into my asshole and I had to shit. I can only imagine the beady, reptilian look of my eyes as my skin clammed over and the mistress of death swung her metaphorical scythe through my being. I’m not sure what I was telling myself in those moments to make it through that experience, but whatever it was worked. I essentially brought myself into such a state of panic that my body became exhausted and began tiring itself. The autonomic yawns kicked in until my heart rate slowed. My body and my mind converged, and before too long, the gear dropped from the bowels of the plane and we skidded to earth, landing was a godsend; I think I literally kissed the ground.

So yeah, every fucking flight I have been on since then has been pretty terrifying, every shudder or jolt of the plane and my heart drops through my asshole which then puckers back up into the base of my brain. I hadn’t given it much thought until yesterday while aboard my flight from Thailand to Seoul. The fear of flying is truly just a fear of death. I am terrified of dying. This fear is amplified in situations where I feel out of control. Which explains why I don’t like being a passenger in a car, plane, bus, or train. I read somewhere this week that control is the opposite of faith. In that case, I am a true heretic, apostate, and committer of sacrilege.

I am incredibly tired in writing this, I have been in transit for some time, sleeping in airports and on planes but only barely. My relationship with Miranda, which has sadly but necessarily come to an end, was absolutely exhausting.

I want to tell you about my Sak Yant stick and poke tattoo. My experience of that was very much related to my experience of flying and therefore my relationship to death. Death is the only thing that is guaranteed in life and so is the only place one can realize a sense of security. Thus, it is paramount that a person make death their companion, that they become friends with her implications and the way she impresses and affects their consciousness. One must surrender to her completely. For she is inevitable. The tattoo that I received from the Buddhist monk is called a Sak Yant, and it was the most painful physical thing I have ever experienced. In order to endure the process and not rip the metal poker out of the monk’s hand and stab him in the throat and face with it repeatedly, I had to surrender my illusion of control and allow myself to become the pain. In order to do this, I chanted an internal and silent mantra. “I become the pain, I am the pain, I love the pain.” Similar to my experience on the flight back from Hawaii, my visual perception of reality began to warp, bend, and shimmer under the intense physical duress. I remained stoic through the tattoo and sat like a rock. When I felt as if I could bear no more and was going to accept the consequences of stabbing this wonderful monk to death, he finished chanting and set his needle down. Right as he finished, the flood gates of my tear ducts burst open and I experienced great catharsis. Another thing that really helped to ground me into my experience and not dissociate from the pain, was to remember your life, was to remember how much pain you experienced in your years. It’s not healthy to dismiss my own pain, but it really helped to create relative perspective by remembering how much you and the rest of the world hurt.

I feel too scattered to synthesis these ideas into a conclusive point, and you know what, I don’t have to. This is a personal letter to my beautiful and compassionate dead brother. It is NOT a college paper. FUCK THE SYSTEM. I’M OUT. (Also, I graduated college last week)

Love,

Dilly