Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

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I've had this image in my head for a couple weeks now. It's actually part of a dream, recurring at this point. It takes place in Spring, '43. Funny how I remember the year. I don't know why or how, but it's the last Spring the I in that dream will ever know. I call it an image beacuse the movement is rough, like a flip-book cartoon.

A Messerschmitt noses itself over through a formation of Allied bombers. Its yellow spinner makes it a member of JG 26, the "Green Hearts". Its rudder has some damage, the stretched fabric burns and oil runs back down the cowl, past the cockpit and wing root. This plane is going down...

Cut to the inside of the aircraft where a disoriented pilot pulls off his fur-lined gloves and fumbles with the birdcage canopy. As it breaks free the plane starts to spin and the pilot sees the Allied B-17's growing smaller and smaller with each rotation. Other fighters are specks at this distance.

I never get out. I don't crash either. I just stare at the bombers and their vapour trails. On my thigh is a pilots log with a pencil attached by string. 23/4/43 The image freezes at this point and everything is silent, like seed filled cotton pressed to my ear.

It's beautiful. It's gone.

I've searched for meaning within this and can't find any but I'm hoping maybe writing it out will make it go away. Dialogue between the unconscious and the conscious results in quite a lot of feeling. Action, behavior, survival, preservation. There's nothing threating in this image. The feelings aren't painful or scary, but it is an image without language. The silence somehow makes it less valid to me. Hell I don't know. At this point I'm nothing more than a person writing about some recurring thought process, some less than random images. And to be honest it all seems rather silly or dime-store novelish, but tonight, in a few hours, I'll be inside a burning Bf 109 of the "Green Hearts" experiencing my last Spring. The Spring of '43.

goodnight 12.14.97