Airports

I could cry a river here at the airport in Denver. Not because I am sad, though I might be. Airports always make me weepy, even now when the speaker is blaring about level orange. The security level interrupts my melancholy, but not too much. I still feel guiltily safe. I am waiting a couple hours for my connecting flight home, neither in Steamboat with my friend since kindergarten or in my tiny house with my three big teenagers. Limbo.

I can’t sit at the gate from which my plane will depart. It’s too early and there is another plane leaving first, a plane to Dulles. I think I’d like to hop on that plane, too. To my sister who recently lost her husband and wants me there, wants all her five little sisters near. Wouldn’t she be surprised if I hopped on that plane instead? What other planes sound good? San Diego? I’ve never been there and with time the way it seems to be accelerating, might never get the chance to go.

The woman next to me on my flight from Steamboat was visiting her youngest daughter who lives in Colorado. Her other two are in Flagstaff and Juneau. She says it is good that the grandbabies are the closest. She lives in Arizona and they are the Flagstaff bunch. I thought about my sister then too, how her only daughter lives in Berlin. Berlin seems so far. Berlin is farther than Juneau, isn’t it? I had asked my seatmate if she came to Steamboat for the Literary Sojourn, like I had. She hadn’t, but knew of the event. She knew of the previous authors and their works. We talked of fiction the last few minutes, waiting for the plane to empty.

The fictitious characters in the authors’ works had minds of their own. All of the authors said so. This made me think I might not be so good at fiction. One author spoke of a character who died and how she didn’t want her to go. But she died anyway. I’d want to keep them alive at all costs. I’d be controlling. I’d feel for the mothers on the pages. I’d not let their children move to Berlin or Juneau. Or, I’d have everyone flying together, big happy families filling whole airplanes. And there wouldn’t be enough tension, too few goodbyes. It wouldn’t be real. It would make for boring fiction, my longing for the constant happy endings.

When I was a little girl, there was no level orange, that we knew of. There were no security gates. We drove to the airports as teenagers and ran around, watching tearful goodbyes and jubilant hellos. There may or may not have been alcohol involved. At my girlhood airport, you could press your face against the glass and strain to see your loved ones in the tiny windows. Squinting and scanning the plane, you wouldn’t be able to find their seat, even if they told you where they were. But you knew they could see you in that big glass. You knew if you jumped and waved your arms furiously, they would see you. They would know you were going to miss them. They would know you would stand riveted to that spot of massive glass until your plane was a speck in the sky.

Now there are only strangers thrown together in all of the airports, the goodbyes and hellos said perfunctorily in baggage claim or carside in the passenger drop off lane. My friend said goodbye to me in the United check-in line. I’m not sure when I will see her next, how tall her little ones will be if an entire year passes. I’m angry at time, really pissed off.

I don’t know how I got to be forty-four, worrying about my own children setting off to Juneau or Berlin. I’m not an author of fiction and they are real. Nothing will stop them from their own journeys. Next year, the two of them who are ostensibly adults could be anywhere but my tiny house. I chuckle at how I might miss the day when I was filled with anxiety about the poker tournaments and broken ceiling fan of their parentless partying.

In Denver, I sit in limbo. I didn’t get on the flight to Dulles and my sister won’t know about my brief Northern Virginia mind travel. My friend calls to make sure I made it to Denver. Quick cell phones check-ins are our alternative to the lingering goodbyes of long ago airports. Still, in my mind, I am pressing my face to the glass and waving my arms like crazy so they can all see me and know how much I miss them, how much I will miss them, my friend in Steamboat, my sister in Virginia, and my teenagers who are too soon to fly away somewhere very far from me.