After a very long and nerve-wrecking wait, the plane moved. The pilot mumbled something about being sorry for the delay and for that being out of his control. I do not hear every word clearly. He speaks hurriedly and the quality of sound vibrates and travels heavily in the cold air of the plane. I try to not listen to the emergency instructions coming out from the speaker above my head. The stewardess, after completing the waving and pointing, went on to check on the passengers and make sure they wore their seat belts. She asks me gently with a sweet voice if I had buckled my belt. I nod.

She was tall and thin and of fine structure. Her honey silky hair was curled up into a bun. I couldn’t clearly read her facial features and trace her origins. I tried to read her nametag but I failed as she walked and moved as snappy and quickly as a bee in the tight quirky aisles of the flying metal. It was a short name I was sure, one that ends with a ‘y’… Cindy? Kelly? Something like that.

The person sitting beside me, who was none other than my dear friend Jamal, sat nervously, clutching his hands to the narrow chair arms.

“Hamad, what happens next?” he kept asking every now and then.

He hasn't flown in five years, but that is not the reason for his current fear of flying; he used to be looking forward to it. There was a crash where many people died in. In fact, there were no survivors at all. It was a horrible thing that changed the way many people thought and acted here. The whole country still suffers the pang it had left. It was the greatest national disaster. The island was bleeding, full of mourners with sombre faces, it bled for many days and weeks and months.

We've never seen anything like it. Many people in one-way of the other were affected by it; some lost their children, their husbands, their wives, or their loved ones. Other's suddenly had this new phobia of flying, like my friend here, who actually knew someone form that ill-fated plane, a distant relative. He was a flight attendant. He wasn’t meant to be on that flight, he changed to an early one so he could be with his wife-to-be. It was sad.

I remember that I was out driving through the busy streets of Manama with Jamal and Saeed, my brother when we heard it on the radio. We drove towards the airport straight away and found the roads jammed and blocked to the hilt. We somehow managed to get close enough to see the flash lights and emergency vehicles at the bottom of the pier. We were speechless. It was a haunting, frightening sight.

But Jamal had only flown once before this anyway. And he was also with me. That time he was only excited, he managed well for a first timer. But back then for him it was a different experience: It was a fun adventure, something he had longed to do all his life. Now it is, to him, more like taking a penalty shoot at a football game. Most likely it will be a goal and we would reach the safe land, score a goal, but every once in a while the player taking the shot would miss or the goalkeeper would make a brilliant save, in which case it'll mean the end for us, here on this flying fate.

As the emergency instructions were given, Jamal leaned towards me and asked, “Where exactly is this life jacket they are talking about?” He whispered these words hoping that no other soul but mine would hear them.

“Under your arse!” came my reply with a sigh. He was beginning to annoy me with his silly questions and trivial, pathetic attitude.

I run my fingers through the in-flight magazine I find in the bag of the back of the seat in front of me, with only a quick glance at the pictures of each page: I see a picture of a handsome model talking on a cell phone, wearing a long blatant smile, and sporting a fine-lined suit; I see a picture of a beautiful place, a land full of greenery, stretched with mahogany and tall trees, beside it I see another one depicting some far-off beach island with soft, silky sands as rare blue waters reach out to wet them. I yearn for it, knowing that it is impossible for me to be there.

"Hamad, are we moving yet?" I ignore the silly question.

A Western man sat to my right, beside him his Far-Eastern wife holding their little fat child. The baby - who had her father’s golden brown hair and her mother’s narrow beautiful eyes - chuckles at me. I wink and smile back.

The man in front of me was old. He was reading a newspaper, the young boy sitting beside him seemed annoyed and upset. I could feel his every move, fumbling to each side of his chair, trying to be comfortable, probably wishing that the old man would drop dead. I hear people talking, some arguing, a little baby screams, afraid perhaps?

Unclear mumbling from the pilot, reckon it is time to fly.

"Now we are," I say. I feel softness against my shoulder. A softness that sent shivers through my whole body in a little instant, and I look and it’s the stewardess again. Her hip pressed against me as she checked the baggage compartment above my head. She gave me a warm smile and left to attend to some other passenger. This time I was too busy inspecting her face and body that I couldn’t get to read her nametag again.

The moments before the take-off are always filled with awkwardness: There is anticipation, fear, anxiety and worry. One can never pretend one never feels as such in these long moments. The plane moves, faster and faster now. Its accelerating speed is thumping and overwhelming. This is the time where everyone becomes silent and quiet, waiting for the flying piece of metal to detach it self from the ground.

You hear cracklings and you feel your body pushed deeper into the chair and when you look at the other passengers you wonder what goes in their heads, and you see someone reading a newspaper or a book, another biting his nails, someone might even be pretending to be asleep. I look at the back seat and somewhere on the other side near the far corner, I saw two lovers kissing.

I glance at my friend and I find him with his eyes shut close, his lips moving, reciting some verse or the other. Would god really save you when the time comes? Allah only knows.

The plane is now on full speed, heading with all its thrust towards the vast blue sky. I feel a sudden rush as it takes off. My heart and stomach jolt with the tyres. My travel companion is almost up from his seat, he is in his most nervous state. I have never seen him this exposed and vulnerable before. He tries to hide his fear with a smile, but I can smell it, still. I smile trying to calm him down.

The sound of the tiers retrieving startled him. He leans towards me again and places one hand on mine, the other clutching the seat in front of him.

“What? What was that?” he asked in a panic. I shake my head and smile again, I tell him to relax.

I glance at my fearful friend - I can feel his heart pounding from a distance - peaking from his window down to the ground as the plane makes a sharp turn, Muharraq was right beneath us, its small houses getting smaller, its slow cars getting slower.

Things, life, fading away.

Here we are - all of us - on a flaying piece of metal, trusting our lives to it. Putting our lives in our sweaty hand palm and gifting it to someone, or rather something, we do not know. Pray only to Allah to not be one of the unlucky ones to be onboard the next falling plane. How sarcastic and humiliating and pathetic, I thought.

As it was night, I could see nothing but blackness surrounding us from the tight little window across my friend. A few dimmed tiny dots of light are scattered in the lower blackness outside. Must be ships, I heard someone say. The powerful, loud and ear-thumping engines of the plane were tearing the malevolently calm pitch-black sky.

“Are you scared of flying?” asked my tortured friend, who kept staring at the wings and the engines to make sure nothing were wrong with them. He had a most maladroit look on his face.

“No,” I said, “Why would I be? It is just another gambling game we play in life. Yes there is some reluctance, but it is the end result that drives us to take up this gamble. It is another thing we take for granted.” For some reason I tried to be philosophic answering him, but I knew I sounded vague and meaningless. I added, in a lower voice. “Only what Allah has written in his great book of life will happen,” I sounded like my father, like all those people I hated, referring everything in their lives to the supreme powers that be, in the hope of feeling better about what happens to them. Is that what God and Fate is? A justification for Man for not being in control of everything all the time?

I played a movie in my head, one that was nothing less than a nightmare that could have become our reality in another life, or another flight. In that movie, the plane we were on flawed and dived down from the sky thinking about those people who lost their lives down there in that awful crash, I felt the feelings one would go through at such a dramatic moment, when you face your flying fate. A fate of dying horrifically, when you were only thinking of the destination you are heading to, when you worked hard enough to never think of going through this.

I imagined it all. And my heart manifested its tortures. And there was fear, pain and anguish. And more fear. What if it really happened? What if I perished in a plane crash? What then? Where would I be? Down there in the murky waters of the black sea? What will happen to my body? My spirit?

My family, my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters, how will they know? How will they take it? They will only be part of the many families who will mourn and cry. Just like the ones who had a few months ago. I could almost hear their painful cries; see their faces, their souls, hundreds of them, floating over these waters.

"This is really funny,” began Jamal, still struggling to keep a cool face, “But I’m scared!”

"Here, read." I pass a paperback I had carried with me for the flight. I hoped it would busy his mind and keep him from bugging me with his foolish inquires. He waved it away, pulling out his own book, a small spiritual companion containing different pages of Quranic verses and Islamic prayers.

“I’d rather read this,” he said. I wondered if I should do the same. I didn’t.

I'd flown a lot in my life. I have been lucky. It's all about luck and fate, I always tell myself. Some people are as superstitious as to say that one should not fly if the night before he has dreamt of a plane crash. That has happened to me almost every time I flew, and I have to admit it worried me occasionally more than usual, but nothing happened to me.

I once dreamt that the plane I was about to get on board blew up on the runway just like that, the flames were magnificent, eating the whole world around it; and in another dream I saw a plane crash and burn as I laid relaxing on some breach, knowing that a part of me was on it! Maybe it was my heart, or spirit? I don’t know.

It's just one of those things that make you really feel you are not in control of your life, of your fate. We don’t choose our fate, it chooses us, or rather our fates are chosen for us by the more superior powers… Make that God, your boss, or your wife that wants to have you home for the holidays. It could be anything, anytime. What happens, happens because there is no other way around it, because it is the only thing that could happen.

During the former procedure of taking off, I had a single moment solely for my mediation. I had evil thoughts and I had good thoughts. I had thoughts I never thought I would think off.

I thought of the people in the plane, I thought of my friend, I thought of the little child and I thought of my self, of life, of the world. I thought of all these thoughts and what they meant. I thought I could perish, I thought we could all die in a plane crash... And all these smiles, all these faces, all the stories that live in these individuals, all their memories, would be lost and gone and forgotten.. after all, we are only humans. We wouldn’t be the first ones, would we?

In an attempt to escape these horrid thoughts and my now extremely annoying friend, I decided I should close my eyes and begin to sleep. So I tilt my head to the right and relax. But just before I closed my eyes, the cute, elegant stewardess passed me again.

This time I managed to read off her nametag.

Her name was Molly.