Almost There

I sat down by a group of girls who were probably in their early twenties. They spread themselves out on the chairs and the floor with the casualness of a dorm room that had landed into an airport terminal. Books, magazines, laughter, earphones, journals, and general garrulousness was inconsistently broken by announcements overhead. Eventually a pressing announcement of a flight departure would nudge them to gather their dorm room and head for their plane.

It was another day in an airport with gray light filtering through the tinted windows. This state of limbo-- before arriving to a final destination-- always inspired me to people watch. I sat and I observed. I imagined lives and histories of those in front of me.

Everyone kept looking around. We all did as if we could find something that was here all along. A large man with the crew-cut styled Mohawk squirmed in his seat. A pasty white man on his cell phone banged his head with an empty water bottle. An Asian man wearing a burgundy cable-knit cardigan kept moving his book closer to his face, then realizing his book was too close would push it away and eye it with a certain suspicion. Every so often I had the feeling that I was in an psychiatric ward.