The cabin smelled of recycled air and cheap coffee, the kind of scent that settles into your clothes and refuses to leave until you’ve scrubbed your skin raw. Seat 12A. Window. That was my world now. A sixteen-inch square of fabric and plastic where I was supposed to fit a life that used to take up entire drop zones.
I stared out at the desert floor miles below, a patchwork of burnt orange and brown, endless and indifferent. It looked like the kind of terrain where I’d spent the last decade of my life, but it wasn’t. It was just Nevada. It was “safe.” That’s what the paperwork said. Honorable Discharge. I called it being put out to pasture.
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