The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had to Swallow)
"Yemen."
Chandler looked around the plane and then settled back into his seat as he grumbled under his breath. He gnashed his teeth and pulled his bag close to him as if it would be able to shield him from the consequences of his actions and somehow save him from his impending doom. The old woman sitting next to Chandler turned to look at him and he offered her a flat smile that betrayed how miserable he was. He was certain that this was going to be one of the worst days of his life. Not only was he already out twenty-one-hundred dollars, but he was going to be stuck for more than fourteen hours on a plane to Yemen.
"Yemen."
He was still repeating the name of his absurd destination to himself in disbelief. While doing so did nothing to quell his anger, he hoped it would at least keep his mind from racing and focusing on the questions that he did not want to answer. Yet, despite his best efforts, he could not keep them at bay, and his critical self-analysis that usually sent him on a spiral of doubt had begun to tear at his self-esteem once again, like an emotional flagellant.
He sat there and stewed as those unanswerable questions began to swirl around in his brain. How could he have taken things this far? Why can he never learn that he is the only one who seems to get entangled in his web of lies? When will he find the courage to say what he is really feeling and stop being afraid of uncomfortable conversations? How is he going to get back home? What is he going to do about work? Do they serve food on the plane?
He looked out the window, and squinted his eyes, as if that would help him see inside the terminal. He hoped that he might be able to see if Janice was still standing there, waiting for his flight to take off or if she had finally left, satisfied that she had stood vigil long enough. He thought that if she were gone, he could come up with some ruse to get removed from the plane. Another lie that he could tell which would no doubt end in his arrest as he caused a panic and forced everyone to exit the plane. For Chandler, that outlandish outcome seemed very on brand.
He wondered about how he could have even found himself here in the first place. He could have easily rejected Janice the moment she walked back into his life. He could have told her he was not interested in starting up a relationship with her again or tell her he was not ready to start dating anyone. Perhaps he could have come up with a smaller, less expensive lie and pretended he already had a girlfriend. He could have pulled that off. He could have even just said that he was still with Kathy. Anything would be better than sitting here on the tarmac ready to embark on what will probably be the longest three days of his life.
He slumped down in his seat and turned away from the window. Did he do this for Janice? For himself? For both of them? Suddenly, he was not sure anymore who he was lying for and why. Who was he protecting? Why did he have to think about Kathy now? When he has all this time to himself to wallow in the memory of another woman rejecting him, like so many had before.
Chandler was pulled from his thoughts as he heard the captain announce a delay for the flight. He could not make out all the words, but he heard something that sounded like ground crew and something else about water. He looked around and tried to get the attention of one of the attendants for more information, but he assumed he must have turned invisible since he boarded because none of them looked his way despite his demonstrative waving.
"Yemen!"
He looked back out the window and shook his head. The last thing he wanted was more time to himself, alone with his thoughts. The kind of thoughts he always tried to cover up with a well-timed, self-deprecating joke or a sardonic comment. Normally, when he started to dwell on his own inadequacies, he could distract himself by playing some mindless game with Joey or hanging out with Monica. Unfortunately, neither one of them was here. It was just him, the old woman who only spoke Arabic, the pilot who needed to learn how to enunciate, and the neglectful flight attendants who apparently did not know that he existed.
Chandler slipped his coat off and rolled it up into a makeshift pillow. He pressed it up against the window and leaned his head on it as he closed his eyes and hoped sleep would take the events of today and thoughts of Kathy from his mind. As he felt himself start to drift, he asked himself a question that he had no intention of answering.
"Did I ever tell Kathy that I loved her?"
Chandler felt a sharp elbow hit him in the ribs. Although the rough nudging he was receiving did not cause him any real pain, it made him wince anyway as he tightly closed his eyes.
"Hey. Italian guy's gay roommate, move over. You're crowding me and disturbing my needlepoint."
Chandler popped up the moment he recognized the familiar, gruff voice that was accosting him. A voice he had not heard in over two years. His snapped his eyelids open like roller-blinds and turned quickly to see Mr. Heckles sitting next to him. His mouth dropped in shock and his mind raced with a million questions, paramount among them, how could a dead man be sitting on the plane next to him.
Despite everything he wanted to say, all Chandler could get out was a low and almost inaudible, "You don't do needlepoint."
"I could do needlepoint if I wanted to."
Chandler shook his head. "What, how, I don't...what's going on?"
Heckles turned to look at Chandler and twisted his lips into a scowl. "Huh? Speak up? For someone who made a lot of noise all the time, you sure do talk low."
"Yeah, but, how are you here?"
"This is my flight. I'm supposed to be on this plane. You should be asking yourself why you're here disturbing me."
Chandler looked around the plane in a panic and then turned his eyes towards the window. He watched as the clouds rolled by. He turned back to Heckles and his eyes opened wide in horror.
"Your flight? Oh no, did I…uh…am I…is this heaven?"
"What?"
Chandler looked around at the other passengers and then lowered his voice as he spoke into Heckles shoulder. "You know…are we dead?"
"You're not dead. This plane isn't going to heaven. It's going to Hermit Junction."
Chandler sat up straight and looked around again. Suddenly, he noticed all of the passengers that were with him on the flight to Yemen were switched out for rows and rows of lonely looking men. Each one of them looking forward, with sunken eyes and joyless faces.
"This doesn't make any sense." Chandler looked around again and then slumped in his seat. "I thought I stopped this from happening. I know what I want."
"What? You think no one on this flight knows what they want? They know what they want, they're just too scared to get it."
Chandler looked over at Heckles and shook his head. "What?"
"That's not you and me though. We aren't like these losers. We see what we want, we take it. We're a couple of go-getters."
Chandler looked Heckles up and down. He looked exactly the same. He was wearing a threadbare robe that was missing the sash. "You don't look much like a go-getter."
"I could be a go-getter if I wanted to."
Chandler sighed and rolled his eyes. "I don't understand. I saw the pictures you had in your apartment with all the women you rejected, which for the record, I have a lot of questions about. Like, how in the world did you go out with that many women?" Chandler shook his head. "Never mind that. What I'm trying to say is that I stopped being like you. I stopped worrying about superficial things. I even went out with Janice again." Chandler turned back towards the window and slumped his head against the side of the plane.
"You know what your problem is? It isn't that you don't know what you want. It's that you can't deal with rejection. Probably because of your parents."
"What? How do you know my parents?" Chandler turned back to face Heckles, but he was gone. In his place stood a professorial looking man, with glasses, long hair, and a well-manicured stubble-beard. "Hey…I know you…you were that psychiatrist that went out with Phoebe! Roger!"
Roger shook his head and offered Chandler a condescending smirk. "It's funny that you're so afraid of rejection. You should be used to it. You get rejected all the time. What's there to be afraid of?"
"What?"
"Think about it. Your parents rejected each other. They rejected you. Girls rejected you. You the king of rejection."
"Hey, that's not true." Chandler folded his arms defiantly and then looked around the plane. All the lonely men were gone, and now they were replaced by women, but every woman looked slightly familiar to him.
"Of course it's true. When you were a child, your mom and dad never really listened to you when you tried to tell them how you felt. You had to deal with all of those negative feelings on your own and figure out your own, and quite frankly damaging, form of therapy. That's why you hide all your trauma underneath jokes, and you avoid confrontation. You have all these scars from their initial rejection, so, every time someone rejects you, you go back to being that little kid who got hurt by mommy and daddy."
Chandler turned to jab an angry, defiant finger in Roger's face, but paused when he saw Jill Goodacre sitting in a row next to them. He became slack-jawed and blinked his eyes several times.
"Why is Jill Goodacre here?"
"All the women in your life that you have ever had a crush on, even in passing, are here on this plane." Roger looked up over the seat in front of him. "There's Missy Goldberg from college." He turned back and smugly smirked at Chandler. "You sure do like a lot of women that you never talk to."
"And you sure are just as annoying as I remember."
Roger chuckled under his breath, took off his glasses, and wiped the lenses with a cloth he pulled out of his pocket. "Am I annoying or are you just upset that you have to finally face all your shortcomings with women?"
"No. You're just annoying." Chandler folded his arms again and turned his attention to the sky outside the window.
"I'm only telling you what you already know. Your unresolved issues about your parents has led to every confrontation you avoided in your adult life. Every lie you told, and every person you held at arms length that you thought you were protecting yourself from, was really just a way to keep yourself from revisiting all the trauma that you never dealt with from your childhood."
"Nuh-uh."
"Think about it. Do you even remember telling Kathy you loved her?"
Chandler chewed on his lip and then spoke through gritted teeth. "No."
"And why not?"
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do. Because you think that the people that you say 'I love you' to end up hurting you and then they leave you."
"Well, Kathy did all those things anyway, so what does it matter if I told her or not." Chandler turned to confront Roger, but he was gone. In his seat now was a beautiful, familiar woman. She had dark curly locks that bounced around her shoulders and exotic, olive skin. He knew her immediately.
"Aurora?"
"Hello Chand-lrr."
"Oh my god. Please let me stay right here because this dream is finally getting good. Are you going to get naked?"
Aurora laughed and shook her head. "No. I'm not."
"But we had so much fun when we were naked."
Aurora gently put her hand on his arm and smiled sweetly at him. "Chand-lrr, you'll just reject me again."
"What? No I won't. That was a different Chandler. That was a much stupider Chandler. I don't reject beautiful women anymore."
"Chand-lrr. We could go now and make love in the back of the plane, but it will leave you hollow again."
"I'm willing to take that chance. I like hollow. I like all the hollows. Sleepy Hollow, Hollow-ween. I'm sure I'll think of others."
Aurora smiled and ran her fingers along his chest as she leaned over to get herself closer to him. "Oh, but you had that chance, and you refused. Do you know why?"
"Because I am a stupid, stupid man."
Aurora laughed and pulled back away from Chandler. She settled into her seat and began to unfasten her seatbelt. "No. It is because you want more than just mindless sex and a temporary reprieve from everything that weighs down on you."
Chandler started to wildly gesticulate with his hands as he shook his head quickly from side-to-side. "No, no, no. I love temporary reprieves. I live for mindless sex."
"No you don't." She leaned over and kissed him gently on the cheek. "You want to find love Chandl-rr." She placed her hand over his heart. "You want someone who will take this part of you right here and cherish it in a way you have never experienced before. You don't want to be alone and bitter."
Chandler turned his head away as he placed his hand over hers and sighed. "I don't want to be a hermit."
"Yes. But to do that, you have to grow up. You have to be able to recognize her when you find her, and you won't be able to do that if you keep playing your silly games. You have to be brave enough to tell her how you feel, even if you don't know how she will react. You have to stop sabotaging yourself by being you." Aurora slid her hand away from his chest and onto his shoulder as she began to push him gently away from her. "Now wake up."
Chandler eyes popped open as he felt someone gently nudging him on his shoulder. He picked up his head and wiped at the corner of his mouth, blinking several times to try and bring the world into focus. "Heckles." Was all he could get out before he realized that the hand on his shoulder belonged to a flight attendant.
"Sir? Are you okay?"
Chandler yawned and attempted to stand up. "Yeah, sorry, I guess I was out like a light. Did I sleep all the way to Yemen?"
"Oh, I'm sorry sir. Unfortunately, we were delayed for about four hours due a mechanical issue, and we are required to deplane at this time."
Chandler swung around and smiled gleefully. "We're still in New York?"
"Sorry to say, yes. When you get inside they'll give you instructions on how to reschedule your flight."
Chandler pumped his fist triumphantly and began to dance awkwardly. "I love ya Big Apple!"
Monica jumped when she heard the phone ring at the same time that she touched a wire through one of the holes that she had made in the wall. She pulled her hands back and held them close to her chest and waited as she listened, but once the phone rang again, she sighed and walked over to answer it.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Mon? Uh, I need some help."
"Chandler? Where are you? It's so loud."
"JFK. Look, I have no cash on me and my credit card is maxed out from the plane ticket to Yemen. The airline would only give me a credit. I tried to talk a cab driver into taking me home, but they aren't very receptive when you tell them you have no money."
"Yemen? What…" Monica shook her head. "You know what? I don't want to know. What do you need?"
"I have an emergency credit card in my room. Can you get it and call up a car service to pick me up?"
"Sure. If you wait by the phone, I'll call you back when I'm done."
"Oh okay. You don't have to call me back. I could just wait outside."
Monica shook her head. "No. You need to know the name of the driver and the number of the car. Ooo. I'll also get the make and model of the car that's coming to pick you up. You can never have too much information."
"Great. Maybe you can find out what the driver's favorite movie is too and we can all go out to the video store later and rent it!"
"Do you want me to help you or do you want me to hang up so you can keep making your little jokes."
"I want you to help me."
"Okay, I'll call you right back." Monica moved the phone from her ear, but then quickly picked it back up again. "Hey! What the hell does the light switch by the door do?"
