Barbequed Pork

Barbeque… barbequed pork.

I was disappointed when my psychiatrist did not immediately make the connection between the incident and my new phobia regarding eating meat. Maybe I simply wasn’t eloquent enough, I thought, and that the trauma had ruined my ability to express myself. But when I told her I also wished I wasn’t conscious as the crash happened, she still asked me why that was the case. And here I thought that emotions were the easiest things to convey of all the psychological phenomena—ideas, feelings, experiences, phobias, et cetera—and yet she still asked me why. Are you stupid? The answer should be obvious. But then I realised maybe the job of the therapist was to just keep asking why, and so I pressed on.

I found it was a comfortable starting point to explain that the interior of the plane smelled like smoke and barbeque, but I was dissatisfied with how undescriptive that was. For many years I tried using search engines to get other accounts of similar incidents—when I realised human accounts were not evocative enough, I asked generative AI to explain what burning crashes feel like. I watched videos of plane accidents and terrorist attacks, but none of them satisfied my itch. Then I watched horror movies, war movies, all sorts of banned experimental movies that probably put me on a list, but none of them felt close enough to the real thing. It’s incredibly easy to recreate the visual and audio aspects of something, but I wanted so badly to let anyone else know about the smell. When I realised I would never reach that point, I stopped therapy sessions and told people I was well.

Get… get out… jump out…

I was not well, however. My parents died on that flight. Spiritually, I did too. I was lucky enough to be sitting in a row with ample enough room to not immediately crack my skull on something hard, and also lucky enough that the TV screen in front of me didn’t come apart and impale me in the face like I later read some people died instantly from. Instead, the window assigned to me very conveniently became loose, alongside with most of the fuselage holding it together. I noticed the brains of the passenger next to me splattered across the headrest where the ceiling of the plane caved in whereas I only had a mild concussion. There was a lot of screaming from the rear of the plane, and it was extremely hot. If I’m remembering correctly, I briefly caught a glimpse of somebody on fire sitting on the opposite side of the aisle, but by that point, instinct took over, and somehow I’d found myself walking away from the plane and into a group of bystanders split evenly between trying to help me and desperately trying to take my photo. It was only in the hospital that I remembered that my mother was sitting next to me and that I was a horrible son. I should have just killed myself.

I began to read a lot about the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the descriptions of the heat—and most importantly, smell. Barbequed pork mixed with a sour undertone, someone wrote. I shaved my head and burned all of my hair in the sink once to see if it would recreate the scent, but it didn’t. It smelled rancid; unappetising. It didn’t smell like barbequed pork.