En route (aka the terrible traveller) - Part 1
Notes from a terminal state
I’m writing this in an empty airport terminal gate, attempting to shake off the strange anxiety that plagues me whenever I travel. I say strange in the sense that I’m not generally an anxious person. But here I am driving into the airport, attempting to somehow console myself by imagining arriving at the airport with nothing. Literally nothing. Just naked, waltzing into the terminal and having to make do. I get a few looks, but I have to make it work. Surely no reality of things forgotten could be as bad as that, could it? I hear prison food is bad, too. So, no, it can’t be as bad a I imagine it.
I picture my beloved, beleaguered wife at the other end.
‘Why did you bring all those notebooks?’
‘Do you really need your laptop?’
‘Maybe you should have worn clothes, instead of just that hat and a fig leaf?’
‘You forgot to bring X, the only thing I asked you to bring that underpins our family’s very survival for the next 24 hours, and is required immediately to prevent utter and impending catastrophe?’
I to to check into my flight (Is that the term? Did I do it wrong?) and imagine the genial gentleman telling me I bought my ticket to fly from Albury, Hungary, instead of NSW. I picture Rod Dreher boarding a flight, an empty seat beside him that was meant to be mine (damn, he can write, can’t he?). Or the man behind the desk will look at my backpack and ask, puzzled, ‘Were you expecting to take that on board the flight?’ Well, of course, everybody else has a bag, don’t they? Maybe they bought their luggage a ticket? What do I know?
When other passengers waiting to board ask each other questions, I listen in with a desperate curiosity. What do they know to ask that I haven’t even thought about? What wonderful capacity to manage this process do they have, that I couldn’t even imagine? Of course all sorts of people fly. One man nearby belches loudly, trying to manage the gassy consequences of his energy drink. If he can do this, surely I can. All sorts of people fly all the time. I have the occasional paranoia that every other passenger is looking at me, bemused: doesn’t he know he has to _________?
‘Did you go through security?’ one friendly woman asks another. Security? Is that different to what I did? Did I go through security? Will they stop me as I attempt to board? This is him, the guy that tried to skip security! My futile explanations will do little to avert my arrest. At least I’m not naked this time.
I see another woman reading the instructions on the ‘baggage allowance TEST UNIT.’ Surely the upper case letters are a bit much. Should I be testing my baggage in the TEST UNIT? She decides against using it, but she knows something I don’t. Once announcement follows another. Smoking and vaping are not allowed on the tarmac. Damn it, I don’t smoke cigarettes or vape, I can’t believe they’re telling me that they’re not letting me even consider not doing that thing I never do. Where does it end?
I have to post this before I board, to know that my final, weary, anxious musings aren’t lost in the wreckage. Someone tell my long suffering wife I made coffee at home so as not to buy one here at the terminal. She has to know. Yes, I’m naked, I brought nothing, I failed to clear security, and the carry on baggage I forgot doesn’t pass the TEST UNIT I didn’t use. I can’t even console myself by taking up vaping and blowing that strange steam out on the terminal, like some kind of confident, tar laden, post industrial dragon man.
But I saved five bucks on the coffee. That has to count for something. But that snotty, blotchy toddler keeps staring at me through the glass panelling separating our gates… What does he know that I don’t?