Page 88 of The Love Haters

As the meeting wore on, the dread grew. By the end, I had a significant tied-to-the-train-tracks feeling.

But here’s something you might not know about the US Coast Guard. It’s not the same crew flying every sortie. The crews change depending on days and schedules. Procedures are standardized so that everybody can work with everybody, and this makes it easy to come together in emergencies and work with different people.

Today, we had a pilot named Mira, a copilot named Noah, a flight mechanic named Vanessa, and Hutch.

Plus me. And my camera.

During the meeting, I’d decided to announce my weight together with the camera’s, thinking I could imply with my voice that the camera was exceptionally heavy. I liked the obfuscation of this plan. The plausible deniability. Anything was possible in this scenario! I could be awaiffor all they knew. A waif carrying a Mack Truck of a camera.

It would have to do.

Maybe I wasn’t scared of the helicopter at all. Maybe I was just scared ofthe meeting about the helicopter.

But I guess I got lucky.

It turned out, we didnotall have to announce our weights out loud in that meeting. All those numbers would happen later, in the equipment room. So this nightmare scenario I’d been fearing for weeks of having to stand up in a room full of cool people and announce some number that would randomlydefine my value as a person… just didn’t happen.

Isn’t that how it always is?

The thing you’re afraid of is never the thing you should be afraid of.

Instead, in the equipment room, as we got our flight helmets—which were blue and sparkly, like bowling balls—the pilot, Mira, took me quietly aside to a scale in the corner. Just an ordinary scale. And just the two of us, alone.

“I just need to get your number,” she said, lifting up a clipboard.

“Oh,” I said. Then, “That’s it?”

Mira nodded. “That’s it.”

Relief bloomed in my chest. “I’m not going to look, if that’s okay.”

“That’s totally fine,” Mira said, woman-to-woman.

I stepped on, and then she looked down, and then she wrote a random number on her clipboard, and… that was that. All that buildup for a beautiful kind of nothing.

Next, she said, “And the camera is—?”

“Twenty-two pounds,” I said. Honest, this time.

She wrote that down, too.

“You don’t need to weigh the camera?”

“Not really.”

“Is that because people only lie about their body weight?”

Mira nodded. “Yep. When people self-report in their distress calls, we always add another ten percent.”

“I would’ve been truthful,” I said. Or as truthful as a personfully guessingcould be.

“I sense that about you,” Mira said.

“Thank you,” I said. Then I added, “You are now the only person on earth who knows that number. Including me.”

“Am I?” Mira asked. “Wow. I’ve already forgotten it.”

And because she was a pilot in the US military, and because I didn’t know if it was allowed… I didn’t hug her right then.

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