My curiosity for airports developed at an early age when I would sleepily climb onto the cold leather seats of my mother’s car before dawn, holding my pillow to my chest and listening to my father carefully lift his suitcase into the trunk. He moved with a precise easiness that only arises from habit, from the gradual cultivation of a routine that gives the body its own memory. For my father and I, it always began with him sitting at the edge of my bed, cupping my warm face in his hand and quietly calling my name so I wouldn’t be startled.
Sofi, ya es hora. Ya me voy.
And I would pull myself up from sleep and shuffle downstairs, always finding the hall light on and dimmed as I stepped into the odd hour of departure.
I was never fond of my father’s absence, but the Knoxville airport made me tender.
How amazing it was that my father would cross oceans and see so many things I couldn’t, yet I always found him right where I had left him, unchanged.
I often wondered what he experienced every time he passed through security and vanished from my sight. Didn’t he ever get lonely just waiting there? Was he able to find pistachios or dried banana?
This past year of wandering through airports alone has exposed me to a series of brief interactions and curious moments that only seem to transpire when you have no responsibility other than to wait.
***
Earlier this summer, I settled in Iowa City for a poetry course I was taking at the Iowa Writers Workshop. There, I befriended a handful of girls who I quickly grew fond of and relied on for company and poetic collaboration. This is how I came to find myself in the O’Hare airport, sitting next to Rachel, who has a pathological fear of citrus — it isn’t the color, she assures me — and who was vigorously working her way through the entire collection of Louise Glück’s poems, sharing a handful of red grapes that were beginning to soften in the waxing heat of the midwest emanating from the windows. We read together in silence, only stirring when we flipped a page or clicked our pens to mark lines we wanted to remember later.
“Here read this poem,” she leaned towards me and handed me the heavy edition that I placed on my lap. She popped another grape into her mouth. The poem was titled “Departure”, and I couldn’t help but smirk, though I knew she hadn’t intended the connection.
Apparently, after so many years, you need distance
to make plain its necessity.
***
The only time I passed through the Vegas airport, it was a docile sleeping beast. Most of the lights were turned off so that the few so that the few that weren't resembled spotlights that illuminated a row of green vinyl chairs, a closed candy stand, a wreckage of Starbucks cups poking out of a trashcan with their long green antennae. I walked in the middle of the aisle, for there was no current of hurried travelers moving in either direction. I was eventually ushered to the periphery of the walkway by a posse of shiny gold and silver machines donning colorful lights. It seemed wrong to listen to music, to make any noise at all, as if I would disturb the dozens of resting residents that glowed and blinked silently in the dark, rendering me an insensitive intruder. I moved quietly among them like a tired ghost, hauling my bloated suitcase over the white sheet of tile.
I climbed onto the empty shuttle and as we began to move, I closed my eyes and listened to it rattle like an iron skeleton in the dark. Arriving at concourse E, a voice informed me. I stepped out into the now well lit walkway that I followed until I arrived at my gate.
It was 1 am. My flight was the only one scheduled.
I waited.
I chewed dates, my fingers turning sticky, and watched an old man across from me nodding off, his wife’s hand resting gently on his knee.
***
Back in O’Hare, nearly always a midpoint in my travels, I was still shaking off the fog of an abruptly ended nap when I passed a woman sitting by a large window, playing a rare stringed instrument I still cannot name. An hour later, as I shifted my weight from one leg to the other in line to board, I found myself standing next to this same woman. “Do you want some of this coffee?” she asked me, as I was frantically trying to download my Spotify playlists so I could still listen to Chance the Rapper’s new mixtape while cutting through the pith of an evening cloud.
“Does it have milk?”
“Coconut milk and honey.”
I smiled gratefully for not having to explain that I don’t drink milk and took the still warm mug.
“Thanks, I only wanted a sip,” I said handing it back to her and glancing down at the beaten instrument case propped up next to her leg, still curious about what it housed.
“Yeah me too,” she laughed.
***
At the end of my first semester at college, I stood on the beloved carpet of PDX trying to catch my breath. The accumulated stress of the past month had left me weak, sick, and vulnerable to every possible emotion, and I was returning home with an inhaler in my hand and more love in my heart than I could possibly carry across the country. My face was damp and hot, but I didn’t bother to do anything about it as I quickly texted all my friends, telling them what I hadn’t gotten the chance to say during the chaos of my hurried departure. Goddamnit, don’t be so fucking sentimental, I thought, but there’s nothing else to do in an airport, waiting to board, except stand there like a secret catastrophe. The line shifted forward, I gulped water to get the taste of assorted nuts out of my mouth and pressed my phone against the ticket scanner. The light turned green, I slipped my headphones back on. Don’t ever leave a city without telling your people in it that you loved them, I tweeted, as I walked through the tunnel and onto the belly of a white dolphin soon to be airborne.
