at the airport

from the charlotte airport:

I’m traveling alone for the first time. To my mothers dismay, I do not arrive to my gate 3 hours early, only 1.5, and I still have time to send emails and take a zoom call. I feel like an adult. I feel my twenty years of age fresh on my skin, fueling my fingers as I buy my connecting flights and hostels the night before I depart– just the right amount of naivety.

happy birthday! hope you are making stupid decisions and being safe about it.

I read the text out in the airport after checking my carry-on suitcase. I am left only to roam with my purse which I shoved protein bars, corn-nuts, 2 journals (had to leave one behind), and 3 different lip products into; I’ve stretched the middle zipper to fit my laptop in as well. Is this facade of sophistication, this black coach purse, one that I will eventually have to give up? Or do all of the women with silver jewelry and flat fashionable shoes and white pants have purses with childish secrets inside? I’d like to imagine Linda with a large woven tote full of jelly beans, and Georgia with a cross-body purse empty except for a Joan Baez CD and a few polly pockets.

I’m wearing flowy linen pants and many rings and a weary//enthusiastic smile. There’s a family sitting next to me: one of the kids is plugged into the charging port. Thanks to the wonders of bluetooth, the other is running around with headphones on singing to anyone who will listen (it seems the parents are unfortunately not on this list). In front of me is another woman on a computer (like me!) but she seems a lot more stressed and her portable pink fan is not doing much for the North Carolina heat. She rotates between biting her nails, talking on the phone, and murmuring about jpeg files. There’s a lot of characters in the airport today, especially at the international terminal, where a family of almost 25 is sitting outside of A8-Dublin wearing royal blue matching t-shirts, all of them in their own world– I wonder if any of them are thinking about Home Alone 2 right now.

Airports are for writers and airplanes are for poets. Not much to do at the airport except write, but when one gets on the plane, now that is where all rules go out of the window. Time flips forwards and backwards in the air. I’ll be chasing the sunrise all the way to London. On my connecting flight I read a Margaret Atwood short story, 100 lines of Hamlet, and 2 chapters of Beautiful Boy. Now I am just hoping that they have a few movies that are boring enough to lull me to sleep and fatigue my writing hand before I blow through my journal prior to my travels. I land in London at 7am, and I really don’t want to spend a day wasting away in my friends flat.