Amelia Earhart was not lost overseas to engine trouble or fuel leaks. She wrote extensively in her journal, rapt by the speculative fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, warm and worn about her like goggles, that instead of merely keeping debris from creating ocular damage, also focused her vision on the unobtainable. Europe, it turns out, was attainable. A solo flight of little concern to her aviation prowess. What it afforded her was solitude, the freedom to pursue her dreams. And she dreamt of the kingdom of God disrupted; to shatter through the parfait of protective clouds and seize the throne of God, with all of its power. To actually /see/ what lay beyond the atmosphere, to confront the void. And so, halfway across the Pacific, she pitched drastically upwards. The extended aether intrigued her to obsession. What truly lay beyond the clouds, and can one look back at earth, a smug artifact of firstness bronzed and branded into her existence. The machine must have rattled something fierce as the altimeter steadfastly raced. I believe that she got far enough to forego oxygen, to gasp in the bloating of self, scratching through every raspy and meager inhalation, the cold crystallizing on her windshield, her body frozen clasping the yoke to her stuttering chest until she broke through the final layer of clouds, engine a rickety croak and saw, first, before anyone else, before any primate, before any mammal or avian, before any form of life on the entire planet for the entirety of its span, the bleakness of the void, just beyond the apogee of her trajectory. And time stopped for her then, left her consciousness frozen in that moment of painful bliss while the rest of her and the corpus of Electra vanished beneath.