I’m swimming. Snorkeling, the water around me this perfect, clear blue as I skim over the top of a coral reef, colorful fish darting back and forth below me.

There’s an octopus. A lionfish, a shark, a school of colorful blue-and-yellow fish and an eel and I’m just entranced by the beautiful, colorful bounty that nature has to offer.

I dive. I need to see it, need to be closer so I dive and it’s only as I do that I realize I didn’t go down, the water came up. Somehow the water rose above my head and the coral reef and the fish are all forgotten as I look up through the scratched plastic of my goggles and realize that I’m here, but the water is still rising, higher and higher over my head and I think wasn’t I supposed to float?

I kick up, hard as I can. I might be wearing fins and I might not, I can’t tell, and I sure can’t look down because down is bad, up is good, up is where I’m going. I kick again and again, hard as I can.

My lungs scream. My legs scream. I’ve forgotten how to swim and now my hands are just claws, like I can grab the water above me and wrestle myself up, feet no longer moving in any kind of rhythm except for the most desperate one, fluttering and dancing and I’m almost there, to the ever-rising surface as the air leaves my lungs in a rush, bubbling upward and it’s only a couple of feet, if it would just stop moving I could get there—

I wake myself up gasping, choking, chest tight in my harness. Sweat is dripping into my mouth as I open my eyes, look around frantically, tear the harness off and rub my face between my gloved hands.

I gulp air like a madman. I twist and struggle against my seat, the very last thing you’re supposed to do at a time like this because for all I know my neck and back and skull could all be cracked wide open and I’d have no idea, but it’s impossible for me to do what I should right now and all that’s available is what I have to do.

I finally find the latches on my harness, release them, get myself out of the straps and half-fall into the empty passenger side seat. Everything hurts, all at once, and even though I register that, the adrenaline galloping through my veins makes that fact just another one in the whirlwind racing through my head:

This hurts what happened where are we the plane crashed I crashed the plane there’s snow over the windshield is anything broken are we hanging over a cliff like we’re in a movie what about mountain lions are there mountain lions will the plane explode can the plane explode is Imogen okay

fuck

Imogen

fuck

I haul myself up, feet on the passenger door because the plane’s at a fifteen-degree angle, port side over starboard side, and I finally see Imogen.

She’s slumped against her own harness, head hanging down, her wavy brown hair half out of her bun and rioting around her face, her arms dangling at odd angles even though her feet and legs are perfectly prim and straight, in front of her, bent at a ninety-degree angle like she’s patiently sitting at a chamber music concert.

“Imogen,” I say, my breath puffing out in front of me.

It got cold fast.

She doesn’t respond.

“Imogen!” I shout, but nothing happens. It feels like the small space and the cold suck my voice away into nothingness, a strand of hair floating around Imogen’s head as she hangs there, limp, and all I can think is oh my God I killed her, I fucking killed her.

I climb over the angled seats. I kneel next to her, my own limbs not totally trustworthy, the tilt of the plane threatening to topple me onto her, but I manage myself, brace my feet, take off a glove and put my hand on her neck.

Still warm. Blazing, even, her skin hot under my frozen fingers and it only takes me a second to find the desperate thump of her jugular, strong and reassuring as anything.

I exhale in relief, knee braced against her seat, the wisps of her hair tickling my wrist as I leave my hand there for a long moment, reveling in the reassurance that I haven’t killed anyone. Not today, at least, and not Imogen, not yet.

I slump into the other seat next to her. There are a thousand things that I should be doing, a thousand checks I should be making. I should be uselessly radioing for help and transmitting coordinates and checking our supplies and scouting out our location, but right now, just for now, I sit in the other seat and look at Imogen, unconscious, her head back now and her lips parted, glasses off.

I’m shaking. I put my glove back on, still shaking because I just crashed a plane in the middle of the Canadian nowhere and there’s no training for this, no guidebook, no clear path to survival at all.

I don’t know how long I sit in that seat. I don’t think it’s very long, but I have no gauge, no way to tell besides the sunlight outside the snow-covered windows of the plane, but given that we’ve had full cloud cover all day, that’s nearly meaningless.

My head feels like a rock tumbler of thoughts, all crashing around, colliding into each other with gems like you need to find food next to Dad is going to be so pissed about the plane to it’s like that snow fort you were always trying to build.

Finally, I get up. I don’t think anything’s broken, now that the glut of adrenaline has passed and I can feel pain properly. I’ve broken plenty of things — I grew up skiing, played football, then joined the military, I know broken bones — and nothing feels broken now.

The pilot’s side door is impossible to open, either bent or too covered in snow, but I manage to push out the cargo door on the rear port side to a small avalanche of white powder and I get out of the plane at last, heaving a deep sigh because while I’m not claustrophobic it’s easy to get that way when you think you might be trapped in a Cessna 172.

And I look around.

There’s nothing.

That’s not true. We’re in the middle of craggy mountains, steel-colored granite peeking through the snowy mountain tops, the green-black of fir trees down below, the sky above another gray swirl that makes it hard to tell where the sky ends and the snow-covered earth begins.

The plane is down, the nose buried in a couple feet of snow, the port side wing sticking up and the starboard side wing buried under a mound where it plowed under. From the angle of the plane it’s probably bent or broken anyway from the crash landing, not that it matters because the plane is never leaving this spot again.

It’s freezing. It’s windy. It’s impossible to tell the time of day, because the altitude and the cloud cover means that day looks the same from morning until night which means I have no idea how much light is left. For the first time, I realize that the plane’s not yellow because it’s a fun, flashy color, it’s yellow because if it were white it would blend in perfectly with the snow and no one would ever find it.

But when I said that there was nothing, I meant there’s no civilization. Besides the airplane behind me there’s no sign that humans have ever existed, that we ever crawled our way out of the mud and onto land. It could be 2500 BC for all I know. We could have flown back in time.

Imogen and I are alone, together, in the deep wilderness of the Canadian Rockies, battered and bruised, one of us still unconscious.

Despite everything, my stomach flips over at the thought. Yesterday I really thought I’d never see her again, and I was fine with it. Happy about it. I still thought about her a hundred times more than I should have, for a girl I hadn’t seen in ten years, and every single time I did there was the same mix of anger and guilt, revulsion and lust.

I could leave while she’s unconscious, I think. No one would ever know. Even if they found her body somehow, no one would know that I left her here while she was alive.

Just grab your emergency supplies and start walking downhill.

I don’t. I can do bad, heartless things, but not that bad and not that heartless.

I heave the cargo door open again, shove my way past the luggage that tumbled everywhere when the plane went down. It’s probably full of broken shit, glass tumblers and fancy microscopes and other science equipment, I don’t fucking know what.

I shut the door, unsteadily move forward. Imogen hasn’t moved, but there’s a piece of hair floating in front of her face that moves with every breath, so I know she’s still alive, head leaning back against the seat.

Slowly, I pick her glasses up from the floor where they flew, miraculously unbroken. I fold them, put them in her lap. She doesn’t move, and for the first time in years and years, I study her face, no thick frames and lenses between us.

I remember the first time I saw her like this, without them. We were in the alley behind the movie theater where she worked in high school, September, warm enough that we weren’t wearing coats. She’d just gotten off work at midnight, still smelling of buttered popcorn and cleaning product, looking at me suspiciously, like she was surprised I’d shown up.

Imogen had asked me if it was a joke. I told her it wasn’t. Not then.

The strand of hair floats up and down, in front of her face, in time with her breath.