Love is in the airport.
It is encapsulated in the delirium of rushing to crest the horizons before dawn breaks, chasing the sun and counting down the miles knowing each mile subtracted from the thousands-long total is to the rhythm of the heartbeat I’m searching for beyond what I can see.
It’s in knowing you forgot your toothbrush, but that there will be one waiting for you anyway. Losing your Olay old lady sunscreen in security, but remembering your mom uses the same cream because she taught you drug store brands work better than the French ones. We never trust the French.
Each click-squeak-step on that corporate tile is someone on a mission to meet someone: a lover, a brother, a mother, or other.
Business or pleasure?
It doesn’t matter— one is to feed the ones you love, the other is spent with them.
I see my dad in the man behind me for coffee, my friend in a mother cooing her child, a crush in an advertisement, my long-gone grandmother in the slippers seated by my side.
One of my favorite movies growing up was The Incredibles. We’d get asked as kids, “If you could pick any superpower, what would it be?” I knew then it would be flight, even when everyone I loved still lived under the same roof. But I no longer wish for flight. I wish I could stretch myself across the country, just for once to be there for everyone at the same time.
It was a sacrifice I made by growing up out West, going to college in the Midwest, and heading only further East for my career. Most young Americans go through this transient cycle at some stage of their 20s.
It is a blessing and a curse to know a person in every corner of the country, and in nearly every state. It is a sort of superpower in itself to have access to the “national mood,” yet there’s also something so romantic about staying in your hometown forever. I would never regret adopting my national family, but I do wish the country was smaller.
Each visit there’s something new. Another wrinkle on his forehead. The baby can talk and walk. Our favorite restaurant shut down. They repainted the elementary school. She died. He died.
Every slight change is added to a broader picture that reminds me Home is no longer My Home, that friends have their own lives and time marches onward even when we’re not watching it with a furrowed brow.
The airport gives the semblance of control, but controlling is not loving.
Business or pleasure?
Oftentimes both.
There is something so devastatingly lonely about the “click-squeak-step” of airport tile, but grounding that transient vertigo in drugstore skincare and the physical math of missing people across time zones is just gorgeous. That pivot from wanting flight as a kid to wishing you could just stretch yourself across the map to be there for everyone at once? Brutal. A beautiful, sun-bleached look at the tax we pay for growing up and moving away. Your writing feels like home for me 🖤
Not you posting this while I’m at an airport