The Pilot

I plummeted toward the Earth at two-thousand miles per hour. Before me stretched what looked like a buffet of trees,
resplendent in the late autumn sun.

The yellows, greens, and reds of the changing leaves resembled the
platter of a great feast, and I vaguely wondered if I would ever see such a sign again.

I could feel my body achieve terminal velocity, yet I felt strangely moored in space and time. It was obvious that I was in serious jeopardy of losing my life, but the significance of that fact seemed to elude my senses. The sulfuric
smell of burning rubber clung to my nose, as flammable debris dropped alongside me. It seemed deeply ironic that the very instruments used to keep me
aloft could, and very likely would spell my ultimate doom.

An engine whistled by my head. I recognized one of the propellers as it screamed past me. There
was the tail.

I had attained a state of mind that closely resembled shock, but felt oddly more serene. War,
which had so long been a superb antidote to my feelings of social inadequacy, political apathy, and cultural depravity no longer, seemed relevant…or even
necessary. The perpetual feeling I
had of being a stationary object swiveling through an endlessly unpredictable Universe dissipated into a cloud of transcendent calm.

Honor, justice, and morality, the
tropes of my martial existence seemed silly now.

And I, buoyed by the ecstasy of life and the eternity of the beyond submitted to that suffocating liberator,Gravity.