First Flight

I’m 30 000 feet above ground and I’m grinning about the turbulence.

The pilot announces it the way captains do, calmly, matter of factly, with an instruction to buckle up and I suppress the urge to yell ‘Woohoo!’ like some kind of high-flying sucker for punishment.

Turbulence, I recall, is a negative thing.

People yell, they clutch at strangers, nobody grins.

If my mouth weren’t hidden under a KN95 mask, the woman sitting next to me would no doubt ask for a different seat. Instead, I revel in the fact that masks – well known for slowing the spread of Covid-19 – have another function… obscuring the diabolical.

My glee about the potential for being bounced around in a winged sardine can is simply because I’ve missed it.

The plague came, the borders closed, travel became somewhat mythical and now I’m on my first flight in two years, trying not to frighten my fellow passengers.

As I turn towards the window seat, I think about my return to travel.

Hosea Kutako International Airport has had a much-needed facelift and the lovely woman who checks me in notices a little worry around my eyes, soothes me about my first pandemic-era flight and allocates me the window seat with a smiling “welcome back”.

In The Before, the woman may have recognised me from sheer frequency.

Two long years ago, I travelled as though my life depended on it and the coffee shop staff and some of the friendlier immigration officers would greet me by name, teasing something along the lines of: “Miss Mukaiwa! Don’t write about us!”

What feels like millennia later, Ilamo, the coffee shop, is closed and I don’t recognise any of the airport staff. It’s even sadder to scan all the airline boards, looking for that signature yellow and blue as a point of pride and remembering that Air Namibia is no more.

I took my last flight on Air Namibia in March 2020.

My sisters and I had taken a holiday to Cape Town and we’d had such a great time that we lingered at Ilamo for hours, not wanting to officially end a trip we didn’t know would be our last with the airline or for an unimaginable while.

I’ve had those Air Namibia tags on my suitcase for two years and I’m visibly distressed when the man anti-theft wrapping my bag rips them off without so much as a word of eulogy.

It’s what has me a little upset when I reach the check-in, on top of the anxiety about leaving my family for a week.

In The Before, I could leave a little more easily.

I didn’t worry that my family would get sick with a deadly virus and so I’d swan around the world, far less worried about the mortality that has been writ so large in the years since the pandemic began.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com

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