Airplane Mode.

Airplane mode is a setting available on most cell phones, smartphones and other electronic devices that, when engaged, suspends many of the device's signal transmitting functions – thereby disabling the device's capacity to place or receive calls or text messages – while still permitting use of other functions that do not require signal transmission.

I wish I didn’t have to make that choice ever so often. When a pattern seems so adamant to loop every four years of your considerably short life, you start to think whether you deserve it after all. You start to project the unpleasant results onto how you are and you start thinking, hey, maybe it’s my fault after all. Maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe I’m the one who activates it regularly, almost as if it’s a deadline that you have to hit on a certain date set on your subconsciously scheduled calendar. When you’re so flagrantly different than everyone you’ve ever met, whether or not you think it’s the right thing, you start to think that maybe you really do bring it upon yourself to be in so much pain. Which leads to the ultimate question: ‘But do you really deserve the pain?’

You’d think that after a while you’d learn, get something out of it and maybe have a firm grasp on what went wrong to try and fix or avoid it, but it’s always the same thing. And whether or not it is after all your fault, you still blame yourself for it.

Is the right thing worth it? After all you have loved, and you have been loved. The kind of love that’s so strong it’s almost crippling, the kind that has a person willing to put themselves for someone else if it means it’ll protect them and guard them from harm, even if it means it’s you that has to go down instead, and almost as an automatic response you’re willing, and that registers as irrelevant, hardly a cost to haggle down. The one that obliterates your survival instinct and renders you incapable of having it as a valid option to begin with, knowing full well that it’s not the type that can be reciprocated. The kind that makes your well-being sound like a selfish pursuit. That kind.

And you’re met by an incomprehensible resistance. You’re fighting against the other person’s survival instincts, and you can’t seem to get your head around how their survival instincts are set to kill them when yours are set to die for them. How does that even make sense in the natural order of things? Why do you have to make a choice of either having two go down or just one, when neither seems fair?

That’s where the grey area comes, the one that argues that it’s their personal choice that you have no hand in and should accept. And, again, you start wondering. If it’s a personal choice, then does that mean that the protective instinct you have is wrong? Does it mean that in that context, you’ve found a loophole in the mechanism of human communication? That you’re a faulty prototype that was marketed and circulated then dropped like a hot potato and eventually, the CEO decided that retracting it from the market would mean more financial losses and decided to just leave you there till your stock has self-replenished? The update is more lucrative and there’s no sense in further investing in a losing hand?

And yet you still try to comprehend it. Is it still a personal choice when you’re tied up watching someone you love and care about so much hurt themselves? Suicide is a personal choice. If your son let you know that he was gonna shoot himself in 8 hours, would you stand back and say son, you do what you gotta do, but I certainly don’t like it?

It doesn’t make sense. If it’s wrong to go the extra mile to save someone from themselves because it entails trespassing on their personal choice, then why is it still an option in the human psyche? Why is the impulse still activated? Is it put there to torment humans? Is it another loophole that sets our world apart from a utopia? Are you a faulty prototype, a travelling soul that lost its way from the chivalric medieval eras? Is it only tolerated when put in the context of a parent to their child because it can’t be avoided but ostracized in lesser forms of relationships like a friend or a loved one? I don’t get it.

And when you’ve done everything you could against their defense mechanisms, you’re left to handle a conflict with your own. You can’t get yourself to stick around and watch them hurt themselves because it’s too much pain, and leaving would cut off your own air supply, because you loved too much. And it seems cruel. It’s cruel that you have to make that choice ever so often. And you always do the same thing, because it is no longer a choice. You willingly obstruct your own coverage, and you no longer have signal, hoping that it would cause the least damage and leave you pseudo-functional.

Flight mode –other names include airplane mode, offline mode, and standalone mode – is a setting available on most cell phones, smartphones and other electronic devices that, when engaged, suspends many of the device's signal transmitting functions – thereby disabling the device's capacity to place or receive calls or text messages – while still permitting use of other functions that do not require signal transmission.