At this low altitude, there’s still phone reception. With an awkward lurch, the Cessna plane, scarcely bigger than my 2008 Toyota, begins a wild dance in the enveloping tropical fog. Gripping my phone tight, I concentrate on my text exchange. I must distract myself from what I cannot control.

Reuben, my husband, and I are coordinating our reunion at Quepos airport — an airfield, really, plopped in the middle of hundreds of acres of palm plantations. The regional ‘airport’ is little more than a humble three-walled building at the foot of an only recently paved runway. There’s no metal detector. No security. No flight attendants. At check in, you stand on a luggage scale with all your belongings. And when it’s time to board, a young pilot wearing sunglasses loads your bags himself before offering you a beer from a small cooler tucked behind a cargo net at the plane’s rear.

The flight from San Jose should last 20 minutes — a quick buzz from city to sea punctuated with views of Costa Rica’s dreamy jungle interior.  The plane seats about 12 passengers but this afternoon it’s not full. Unlike the three American tourists also on board, I’ve flown this route many times. While it’s generally less aggravating than the 4-hour drive between our home on the coast and San Jose, it’s not without risk.  More than once, I’ve been airborne on what was scheduled as a direct flight, when the pilot shouted over his shoulder that we’re making a pitstop at Puerto Jimenez or Golfito to pick up a few more passengers as if we’re just his kids piling into the back of a station wagon after soccer practice.

I’m sitting in the first row, directly behind the pilots, close enough to smell their cologne, to see the threadbare carpet under their feet and the zip tie holding a piece of the door's plastic interior to the metal frame. Moments ago, I was tracing rivers snaking through rural canyons before tumbling into frothing cascadas. I snapped photos of the striking cloud formations marching towards the mountains, sending one to Reuben captioned I’m almost home!

But suddenly, before we begin our descent, we’ve encountered oblivion. We are in space. We are underwater.  In the fog, there is no up, no down, no here, and no there. 

I study the pilots. They seem tense. Or is that concentration?  I resist the urge to reach out and wipe the sweat beading on the closest pilot's neck. Through a gap between their uniformed shoulders, I can see the cockpit’s flight console. The instruments make no sense to me except for one — the horizon indicator — a simple dial that indicates the aircraft orientation in relation to the ground.  Panic burns my chest when I realize the needle suggests we’re flying sideways — one wing towards the ground, the other to the sky, seemingly 45 degrees off where I’d like to be.

Outside my window a fizzy whiteout of cloud and rain tries to press its way inside. A thin skin of aluminum alloy and acrylic glass are all that separate us from now and nothing. The world, which a moment ago dazzled me with its horse farms and barrios and waterfalls and two-lane highways has shrunk to the inside of this plane: population 6.

Part of the appeal of being a writer is embracing that we live in narratives mostly of our own making. My fantasy selves are inspired by my untethered ambitions and whatever Netflix movie I watched recently. I might predict that in my last moments, I’d compose a line that made every earlier musing that much more extraordinary. Or perhaps I'd lean into my talents for deadpan, summing up my life in a pithy phrase that, had I stuck around, I'd have leveraged into the recognition in death that eludes me in life — a tragedy that belies so many creative geniuses.

I tap I love you into my phone and hit send.  These could be my last words to Reuben — not my best work, but there’s no time.

Then, I surprise myself. Facing imminent death, my panicked brain scrolls through 45 years of experience looking for something to cling to. It screeches to a halt when it reaches the late 1990s, and my lips begin to whisper:

 Hail Mary, full of grace

Last uttered while I attended St. Francis Catholic High School, some 27 years ago, I still know the prayer by heart. I didn't even consider myself a Catholic then. Now, I subscribe more to Eastern philosophies to the extent that I hang Tibetan prayer flags in my garden and every Sunday, when the yoga studio texts the schedule, I debate each offering with deep consideration, yet rarely make it to class.

Blessed art thou among women.

Why don't I know any Buddhist prayers? I'm annoyed by my lack of creativity — that I've limited my options at this critical time. Resorting to a Hail Mary? So basic.

When I graduated from Saint Francis in 1997, I was relieved to shed that membership. The Roman Catholic patriarchy and its “no jeans” dress code weren't going to hold me back any longer. Since then, I've constructed many identities.  Snowboarder. San Franciscan. Single lady. Atheist. Anthropologist. American.

Sometimes the identity will arrive out of nowhere — yett fully formed — like the miraculous couple of years when I was a Long-Distance Runner.  Others were more of a slow build. Expat. Ex-drinker. Writer. Wife.

But who are we really when our carefully constructed identities fall away? Turns out, after getting my 'I love you' out of the way, I'd cling to whatever faith I'd known. I'd recite words that not only embodied an ideology I claimed to reject but, worse, they'd been on countless lips of the dying and devastated for millennia. When it comes down to it, I'm a cliché.

Eyes glued to the teetering needle of the horizon indicator, I care little about identity or legacy. Even if I can’t avoid death in a jungle explosion, how can I be ok for this tiny moment I have left?

Pray for us — now and at the hour of our death.          

The needle tips toward neutral and we drop below the weather revealing the mirrored blue of the Pacific Ocean. As we hurtle towards the airfield, I see Reuben’s car parked at the chain link fence but can’t yet make out his tall frame topped by the baseball cap he always wears.

We hit the earth with a sharp bounce. Before I can exhale, an alarm squeals from the cockpit. The pilots’ faces remain stoic, but the runway between us and Reuben and the chain link fence disappears way too fast. Less than a hundred feet from careening into the fence, the plane skitters to a stop in front of the three-walled building.

Amen.

As the pilots complete their post-flight checklist aloud, I try to detect the unspoken between them. When we’d taken off in San Jose they’d been laughing, even flirtatious with the passengers, but now they seem somber — all business. The other passengers seem unaffected — voices raised in excitement about their arrival and only concerned how to find a taxi.

I tumble off the toy-sized plane onto the tarmac. The pilot who’s neck I’d studied moments before hands me my bag.

“Pura vida, welcome to Quepos,” he smiles. Skeptically, I return his pura vida — Costa Rica’s ubiquitous national saying — while telepathically trying to impress on him that I know.

At last, I saw Reuben behind the fence and he waves. Walking towards him, I pass a gaggle of tourists, phones at the ready, waiting to board the plane for the trip back to San Jose. They filmed our landing, and now, it’s their turn in the sky.

Cocooned in the passenger seat of Reuben’s tank-sized SUV, I’m soothed by the familiar perspective, the predictable, palm trees out my window in their dark mossy rows, just as I’d left them 10 days prior. My ego is now free to editorialize, and I start by mentally adding drafting my last words to next week’s to-do list.  At least an outline. And I’ll memorize a Buddhist prayer. Just in case — I like to imagine myself as someone who’s ready for anything.

-Claire O’Brien

Through her writing, Claire O'Brien investigates the intersections of memoir, travel narrative and the horror genre. Her essays have received numerous awards, including a nomination for a Pushcart Prize, first prize in the ASJA's Annual Writing Awards in the Personal Essay category, and the grand prize of the Hippocampus Creative Nonfiction 2020 contest. She has a MFA from the Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Costa Rica with her husband and a herd of rescue dogs. Learn more at byclaireobrien.com.