Lifeline (Daniel Ricciardo)

Chapter 59: A Final Goodbye

Okay, this is the penultimate chapter of Lifeline. I'm not very happy with this, but I hope I convey some of the things I wanted to. Please vote and leave a comment as I finish off the final part.

I winced in the coruscating lucent and got ready to clear my throat- the production crew had been waiting long enough already. Apparently, there's basic human reaction to fear (or so my therapist told me), it's called the fight or flight response. When something scares us, our natural instinct is to run fast. Very fast, in the opposite direction. The second response is much harder, incredibly hard actually. It's when you have to ignore every single instinct running through your head. You have to stay. Stay and fight.

That is what I was doing right at that very moment.

It was getting increasingly stuffy inside the makeshift studio and the air-conditioning had been switched off in order for filming to commence. They were just waiting on me now.

I took a deep breath and counted mentally to three. Okay, I was as ready as I ever was going to be.

"Okay, Karin?" a member of the production team asked me. I sat upright in my chair and nodded, wiping my clammy palms on the fronts of my jeans. "Then in three, two..." And the 'one' was silent as the take-board was snapped in front of me.

Once the words began tumbling out of my mouth, they weren't going to stop. Here, a short helicopter ride away from the crash site, I was going to retell the story- for the first time since it had happened three-hundred and sixty-five days ago. I was not going to live in denial for any longer. I couldn't put myself through any more pain.

"By March last year I had flown about two-hundred times. I was a frequent flyer and being up in the air really didn't fuss me," I started, trying to make my Swiss accent evanesce. Even I could tell that I was sounding incredibly foreign. "I work in Formula 1 you see, and so every week is a new country. I used to spend more time in an airport terminal than my own living room.

The night before the flight I went out on a...date, with someone from our team. The thoughts of the previous night were taking my mind off the long flight, making it that little bit more bearable. Besides, I was tired from working back to back days for three weeks. I loved my job but it was stressful to say the least."

I managed to look at the camera lens and tried a small, nervous moue. I had to stop in order to gather my thoughts.

"Take-off was normal and before long I drifted off to sleep, sitting in a row with three colleagues who I worked closest with: Joel, Sam and Simon. Joel and I had never got on but Sam, Simon and I were very good fiends. Some of our team were also sitting in first class.

We were sat towards the middle of the plane, a couple of rows in front of the wings. I remember seeing the four engines and even I was slightly shocked at how big the overall aircraft was. We flew on A380s fairly often, but they are just so...uh, énorme...

Anyway, after falling in and out of dreams for several hours, my eyes shot open. My bottle of water was rattling around my tray table in front of me. Sam asked me if I was okay and I told him I needed to go to the toilet. It felt like we were beginning to descend and I didn't want to hold on until inside the Singapore terminal. Especially not with the water rocking." I laughed timidly and looked up to see the production manager giving me the thumbs up. She probably wanted me to get the interesting bit. I had to get this out of the way first though.

"Walking to the toilets at the front of the economy cabin was easy enough, it was turbulent but I was well accustomed to a bumpy ride. The only thing that wasn't quite normal at that point was one particular air stewardess' face. She looked nervous and they never looked nervous. It was okay though; she had been looking alarmed even before take-off. Prior to our departure we had been warned of the stormy weather, and our flight had already been delayed on its previous leg due to it.