Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Actually it starts here

                In point of fact, this story properly begins a few years earlier, when H was boarding a plane to fly out east to help an old friend drive across the country. Although, if we’re being extremely technical, perhaps it begins at the moment of H’s conception in a queen sized bed in an apartment in San Francisco. Though, if you were to continue in that vein, you’re bound to wind up back in the garden or in the Great Rift Valley, or both, depending on belief structures.

                I imagine then we’d start with the valley and the river. We’d start with flocks of birds—pink and white—soaring across the horizon, flying towards a low slung and heavy looking sun. We’d start with the hippos, wallowing in the mud, nostrils exposed—waiting for the heat of another day to pass. And eventually, we’d move away from the alluvial plains to a copse of trees where two figures would be hunched over, looking out across that same plain wondering where to get food and find happiness.

                Airports are dismal places. H was toting his carry on over his shoulder, he always tried to pack light to avoid waiting in line. Most of being at an airport was waiting in line to confirm that you hadn’t done anything wrong, put in too much luggage, booked the wrong flight, brought too much gel or forgotten your boarding pass. In this way airports were vaguely reminiscent of school mixed with his idea of prison.

                The majority of the people in the airport all seem distant. It’s one of those strange public spectacles where everyone gets together to ignore each other. If someone bumps your bag with theirs it’s considered a violent intrusion of personal space. By and large everyone had agreed to this arrangement, though small children occasionally broke through this spell, ran around laughing, smiled at strangers, or threw fits on the floor, breaking the silent code that most of the adults have agreed to—if we all have to go through the ninth ring of hell—let’s at least do it with some personal dignity.

                Though H tacitly agreed to the same strictures when traveling, he wasn’t entirely sure what purpose they served. Was there anything more uniformly alienating and ubiquitously encountered than air travel? It seemed to him that the tacit agreement that everyone was in it all alone, or with their own particular family group didn’t really make the situation any more hospitable. The only time you saw people commiserating is when something had gone wrong, a flight delayed or someone who had forgotten to take off their shoes. Then you could find some camaraderie in bemoaning the idiots who had caused the problem.

                But who had demanded that everyone in an airport had to be unpleasant? What if airports were like bars, places that you went to meet and to be met? What if people smiled more frequently and didn’t only default to the glazed over look of a person who hasn’t slept in months? H was tired though and sorry he’d agreed to fly across the country. He’d met someone towards the end of his first semester and college and had wound up getting invited to her house for a stay, though he’d had to turn it down in order to help his friend, which now seemed like a stupid idea in comparison with spending time with Nicky.

                Deep down, H was conflicted about the minor inconveniences of being in an airport. By and large he found the bag searches, the gel restrictions, and the endless checking and rechecking of documents and identification to be intrusive and annoying. In some moments, he blamed the attacks of 9/11 for being the worst thing that could have ever happened to air travel, making everyone’s life inconvenient for time en memoriam. And yet, what was a small inconvenience when weighed against the cost of a single human life. Who was he to complain about his nail scissors being taken away when 3,000 people lost their lives? He would give away everything in his bag, every time, if he could undo it. And yet, it still irritated him, these small incursions into what felt like his private life. And the jarring experience of being in an airport of having his underwear sifted and sorted through by an aging woman with curled hair was a reminder of his double anonymity. He was no one, and yet, the fact that he was no one meant that everything he owned could be searched and seized at a moment’s notice.


                Depending on the degree to which he’d packed, one of the most annoying parts was finding a way to reorganize and pack his bag after it had been sifted through. Because yes, he’d brought nail scissors and now they were gone, and he had no idea how everything had originally fit, and wouldn’t this whole process be nicer if the TSA also provided an efficiency expert to repack your bag after the check, maybe even providing a little extra room to assist you in stuffing it underneath your seat once you boarded. 

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