Call me Linda. My tale begins in January, when I was invited to a Vision Board Brunch hosted by my coworker Karina Carvalho. According to Karina, the vision boards, crafted from common drugstore materials, could be used to manifest anything a person wanted in life. I was receptive to the idea, as I’d always subscribed to the notion of an intelligent universe, a web of predestination in which we all were tangled. Only such a cosmic force could bring about my dream of marriage to a plane—what others vulgarly refer to as a “plane crash.” I believed this was my destiny: for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate mid-flight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity. I couldn’t alter my fate, but perhaps, with the vision board’s help, I could hasten its arrival.

Karina had told me about previous VBBs, which her friend group convened at the start of each quarter, but this was the first one she’d invited me to, and I took it as a sign she wanted to deepen our friendship. I was so excited to see the evite in my inbox, I RSVP’d “yes” before considering the risk of revealing my dream to a gathering of normal women. I suspected Karina’s friends would balk at a vision board comprising only photos of planes, or worse, crashed planes strewn in postcoital debris. The imagery might offend Karina most of all, as she was fearful of flying and had vowed never to set foot on a plane again. It was this quality that first drew me to her when I came to Acuity, where we both worked as content moderators for a video-sharing platform. I’d found her trembling in the break room, and learned that she’d just witnessed gruesome footage of plane wreckage in her queue of flagged videos. I comforted her, resisting the urge to inquire about the specifics of the wreckage and whether it could be viewed elsewhere on the internet. I’d always considered aerophobes my spiritual comrades, their fear and my desire flip sides of the same coin, and from that day forward, I knew Karina and I shared a special bond.