Inspired by Brené Brown's documentary The Call to Courage, we narrate in Pueblo a travel story where a person navigates through their vulnerable thoughts from the window of an airplane.
From the Window
Although I possess this universe, I possess nothing,
The Knight in Rusty Armor
for I cannot know the unknown if I cling to the known.
A silence of frightened words takes hold of me. I look out the window and the wind makes the raindrops on the glass run one after another until they spill into a corner. The feeling of excitement before boarding a plane hasn’t changed since the first time I did it a decade ago. It’s strange that a twenty-year-old had never boarded one, but my life was full of that: timelessness, inconsistencies, and persistent rain over transcendental decisions.
The plane flies. Below, a long road becomes narrower, the fields blend into a patchwork quilt of greens and ochres, and an occasional house runs below the plane as we approach the clouds. The landscape turns into a distant blue, reduced to a mountain combined with the sky. It’s sunset and from the opposite side, a golden light enters, giving shelter to that knot tied in my stomach.
“We have to take ourselves where we want to be.” That phrase kept ringing in my head. It seemed so beautiful, so illusory, and so distant. We have to take ourselves; us, me and my demons. To take, like someone leading something, like someone letting themselves fall onto that quilt of fields, even if they are afraid. I think courage has a wide wardrobe; sometimes it dresses like a superhero, but its nakedness is born from the most vulnerable places.
The flight that once seemed in slow motion among the clouds now runs swiftly, shaking the treetops as it approaches a straight runway that I can see from the window. Descending and landing never seem like easy tasks; I mean life. I mean taking myself, taking us, going on the journey picking up our broken pieces to bravely assemble our own patchwork quilt.
