It’s so interesting to me how quickly we settle in. I mean, I’ve been here for 24 hours and I already know that the fly which bothers about me prefers my cheek to my leg. I’ve already moved into my slippers, scuffed to the bathroom a few times, wiped pee from a couple of toilet seats, and had a little spat with someone who was unhelpful, being rude. Yes, I’m quite at home here at Newark.
But it’s not really true; I’m whining inside. I’m on my eighth shot of a name-brand espresso (two iced quads, dash of cream). I’ve got some egg bites picking up fluff in my backpack, and some credit cards in my phone wallet. And I’m whining.
And I even had a bed last night! A sort of sun lounger blotched with human oils. It sloped, but I slept well. Jay-Z sang to me there.
One day recently, my very own daughter said something like this. I was taking orders for a coffee run, when she said:
“I’d like an iced-pump, sugar-pump espresso, with triple-pump, pump-pump caramel. Cold foam (but not tooo cold) on top.” Or some such thing.
“You’re kidding,” I said, reaching for my notebook and my pen.
“Add a Coach bag to that,” Henry said. “A Tiffany locket.”
I just asked a man in a lanyard why the alphabetical Departures board only goes up to ‘O.’
“What are you talking about?” He looked at me like I was imbecilic; like I’d asked him if there was anywhere to get a triple-pumped cockaccino around here.
“I’m going to St. Louis, and that starts with ‘S.”
A few moments later, after consulting his phone, he slapped the board like it was a naughty bottom and said: “Yeah. It’s junk. This screen’s garbage. Gate 82, 9 o’clock.”
To say I was relieved that St. Louis and a flight there hadn’t ceased to exist in my absence would be silly because I was on the floor, genuflected by gratitude, snorting back tears.
“I’ve got to go home, you see,” I said, even though that’s where I’d just been; where old, familiar landscapes whisked past train windows, and people I love said it was as if I’d never left. Sometimes, I wish I never had. And sometimes, when a Departures board isn’t working right, I long for another home with an unloosed ferocity that brings me to my knees. I’m lucky, I suppose; I have two homes. Three if I count this bench just outside Gate 82 at Newark.
“To go forward, I have to go back,” is the sentence that has run through my head these past ten days. I don’t know what it means quite, or, actually, any of the above. But I’ll get there; I’ll understand it in the end.
AB - 5.11.23
"To go forward, I have to go back." A theme that I have been living for the past four years. Loving these dispatches, B.