There is a low whistle here; mournful, keening... but somehow round and robust, completing my sense of belonging in this second and in this space. This is the sound of emptiness that yearns but has not yet given up on yearning. Rightly so that it hasn't, because here I am.

 
       A bank of roiling clouds begin to roll towards me in a steady advance. Standing on the wing of the plane, I look down through the twisted windows and jump down to circle around where the tail has been brutally ripped away. The interior is coyly shadowed and punctuated with hundreds of bullet holes: each one allowing the grey of the turbulent sky to appear brighter through their dim perspectives. Nothing moves inside, except for me — a sensation that has occurred many times on this trip already, and that continues to give me delightful shivers. A lone and rotting alloy ribcage, curved around a fluttering, sentient heart straining to peer through bullet holes to see the world as just a bit more bright than it is.

       I walk carefully along the spars (any semblance of floors have long since rotted or been scavenged) and take my place at what at one point was the entrance to the cockpit. If I position myself in a low crouch just so, there is nothing visible through each rent in the body of the aircraft.

We are lost in the void.

 
       It's like I've clicked into position — an anatomy puzzle where things weren't lined up quite right — and my heartbeat provides temporary life to this spectre, even as it bleeds out again onto the obsidian sand almost immediately. I am red, and the ground is black. Ahead of me, through a head cracked open, the expanse I walked to get here stretches all the way back to the gentle curve of cliffs that line the interior of the ring road. I squirm through where I think the pilot seats must have been at some point, and I manage to cut my thigh on a curled aluminum edge as I nestle back into the gaping cavity left where the consciousness of this plane once rested.

       Scavengers have been here. They've torn off chunks and pried away bits; unfurling wires like lengths of arteries and displacing belts as though crippling ligaments. They've left scrawls of dates and names and stickers and paint and cusses and proclamations of love and politics and nihilism. Everywhere I go in the world people do this, and it makes me so angry the older I get. I twist a wire around my finger and blush crimson as I think about the unobtrusive-yet-hypocritical-as-fuck name I hid somewhere along the ledges of the Pałac Kultury i Nauki in Warsaw a decade ago. A warm red again, against this dark empty shell. I smooth the wire into place and remember that we need these experiences, and these moments of retrospective silence and belonging to understand ourselves better and to grow.

       I document the last twisted gashes in this body on the expanse, and prepare to walk away from the haunting, unfamiliar-familiar place that has so embraced me. As I drop to the sand under the front of the plane, I look back up through the opening. The hole feels almost like everything in the cockpit erupted back up towards the sky even as it all came crashing down. Mangled and grounded as a corporeal vessel, but easy to imagine the eyes and the brain and the soul all bursting back toward the heavens where they belong, leaving these peeled back edges and a sense of freedom in their wake. There is one strand of my auburn hair caught on a razor curl, wafting on the wind. I feel fulfilled to see it represent my movement through this quiet, lifeless place; I feel wistful that I won't be here when it finally breaks free and is carried upwards into the sky; I feel that this is exactly how everything should be. I lope back towards where I left the car as quickly as I can, making sure I never see the end to that tenuous balance.

These are some of my very favourite views of Iceland. There is something I find very valuable in the joy of experience being tempered with more uncomfortable emotion, and sharing the first post and this sequel has been very cathartic. Thank you 🖤

These photos and words are my own work, inspired by travels all over this pretty blue marble of ours. I hope you like them. 🌶️

 

Hi, I'm Crimmi. I run a top 20 STEEM witness with my project partner @followbtcnews. Feel free to reach out to us on Steem.Chat or Discord any time! If we haven't earned your vote, please consider our tools, our work on Discord, and with STEEM.Chat — vote for followbtcnews if you feel we're doing a good job.