Traveling alone is an exercise in unraveling. You exist in the airport in a way dramatically distinct from traveling with a group. When you travel in a pack, you’re a part of your own bubble, you pass by the other families and people rushing by and you think nothing of it; you are too concerned with your own fraught journey: friends yelling that they need to pee or that they can’t remember where they put their passport, sisters impatiently yelling about your tardiness while fathers grumble about how the car coming to drive you to the airport is too small for the price you’re paying, mothers checking and then rechecking and then re-rechecking that the oven didn’t magically turn itself on or that the entire house hasn’t turned into some giant gas leak. But when you’re alone in the airport, there is a certain quietness. There is no comfort of familiar frantic noise. Instead you simply exist inside this place that seems to stand outside of time. Voices shout over one another. Different mother tongues bleed into one giant noise. You stand parallel to men in suits and teens in pajamas and no one thinks anything of it.
Traveling to another part of America is startling in a way that feels embarrassing, the obvious but stark reminder of how different the regions are. These differences aren’t even tangible, nothing more than a shift in energy alerting you to the unfamiliarity of the environment.
Airports do an excellent job of signaling an otherness. Passing through the airport in Houston, Texas is an entirely different universe than the one created in Los Angeles, California, than the one created in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s in the smallest of things-the speed that people walk, the length of the line at the Starbucks, what language you hear the most in the food court—even if logically, at least half of the people in each of these airports are not returning home, but flying home. And yet, it’s hard to not feel like I am the only person who is a foreigner, the only person that sticks out—an old penny forgotten in the cash drawer of our new, post-post-modern age.
In an airport I can be anything that I want. When I’m traveling alone, I am an adult. I have been living on my own since the beginning of time. I am falling apart in the airport with my adult-ness. When I’m traveling semi-alone-without my parents—then I am even more adult. I am the adult to my sister. I stand next to her and am convinced everyone else in this airport sees us as two sisters desperately clinging to each other. That we exist alone. That we are everything to each other because there is nothing in between. None of this is true. But it all could be.
And then you leave the airport. And the weather is never as good. Temporality comes crashing in with the exit of temperate California into sheets of pouring rain. Once, I stood in this
pouring
rain—phone almost
dead, backpack dragging down my
shoulders, duffle bag slipping off my shoulder—and contemplated
turning around. My luggage was overbearing and I was confident my Uber driver had gotten lost. My Uber driver had gotten lost. Upon arrival he granted me aux privileges, to then immediately berate my music choices. Minute by minute, my fantasies of the car turning around and dropping me back at the airport were becoming more and more vivid. The purgatory I had been in, starting at 4:30 in the morning when I left my airport, to my layover in Texas, to the twenty minutes where I had gotten lost in Atlanta’s baggage claim, was abruptly shattered
Ridiculous, considering it had only been about eight hours of traveling. Yet, the protective shield of an airport’s limbo of liminality was rapidly beginning to splodge away, leaving me unbearably present in the pouring rain with an Uber driver who didn’t like Zach Bryan. I had left a place where girls with septum piercings and cowboy boots stomp their feet to country music and twirl for the croonings of Stevie Wonder, to a place where my shitty country music was aptly recognized as just that. My cab driver, once he had finished explaining to me why Zach Bryan’s music is repetitive and overplayed, confidently asked me where I was visiting from. There were no doubts in his mind that I wasn’t an Atlanta native. I’d like to think it’s because he saw how tan I was and the way I was unfazed by a long drive and figured I must’ve been from California. While this likely wasn’t true, it is undeniable that where we are from is embedded in our bones, impressed into the way we move through transitory spaces, dictating the performance of our travel.
This distinct presentation manifested itself the first time I traveled to Cleveland. There had been chatter on the plane on the way there, some sort of sporting event had been occurring, and the plane was filled with the low hum of people excitedly discussing the results. Onable to participate in the conversation left me feeling like a rock in the heel of your shoe-small and unwanted. I felt moments away from sinking entirely into my seat and becoming the flooring of the plane. This was also my first time traveling alone, weeks before I was to start college, and that moment felt like a prediction.
The more you frequent an airport the more its movements twist and twirl like the lines on the palm of your hand. The second time I arrived in Cleveland, I moved with arrogance. I waltzed through the Music Hall of Fame, down the escalator, and threw myself into the hug I knew was waiting. The discomfort of being tossed in the air, head aching from an early flight—chosen for its cheapness, always has its pay offs. Anticipation is what moves you forwards on the journey towards your destination, longing festers in your throat, throbbing with the unsteady rhythm of a TSA line, aching with the frequency of announcements of other planes taking off. Conversely, there is an emptiness of the backwards movement through the airport. The body slinks, deflated through the terminals, slipping into the seat with the knowledge of finality. Things pass in airports. The only place we’re ever truly able to mourn, because it is the only space we exist fully suspended. There are things waiting to be learnt that can only be truly learnt in the discomfort of a tiny chair, with hair a mess scratching at the nape of your neck, with a cold, expired $20 ham sandwich in your lap, eyes faced out to endless expanses of sky.▲
