I’ve had the opportunity to fly more this year than any other year of my life. When the flight attendants start giving the safety speech, I always try to look up and pay attention, because I feel bad if they’re giving their presentation to 50 people who aren’t looking at them.
The last few times, I’ve been intrigued by some of the lines in the safety spiel. I think “put on your own mask before helping others” has been used a lot, both in a fiction context and in terms of explaining things in “the real world.” (Often related to the analogy that a drowning person will pull under anyone trying to save them.)
But the line that I keep coming back to is: “Keep in mind that the closest exit may be behind you.” I cut my teeth writing horror (once I got old enough to start writing plotless stories about rabbits and ducks and my Barbies), and I keep thinking it would be good for a psychological horror story. Someone gets kidnapped and is forced to go through these Saw-like trials to escape, only to find out the villain wouldn’t have stopped them if they’d simply turned around and walked calmly to the exit. But maybe I’ve been playing too many visual novels.
You could make it a metaphor for getting out of a bad situation — if you hate your life, think back to the last time you didn’t, and start cutting out anything dissimilar between the two. No shame in regressing if it gets you out.
Or maybe work it into science fiction. A society keeps looking further and further into the future for the answers to its problems, but the solution is actually in the past. (I personally think re-cultivating silphium would impact the world more than many future technologies, but that’s just me.)
Maybe someday I’ll write one of these, maybe I won’t. If anyone else does, drop me a link in the comments, I’d love to read it!
Words Per Mile 
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