I'm back again, standing in front of the arrivals board. I'm back for another look, as though something might have changed in my favour. As though some time might have been swallowed up more quickly than usual. I've given myself enough time to construct a disaster out of boredom. I'm already a mush: expectant, excited, anxious and annoyed. But there's nothing unusual about that. Most people who go to airports feel the same: arrivers, departees, waiters, daytrippers, plane spotters, never mind the workers. There's the holiday that's over and the fear of the holiday to come. There's fear of flying (and fear of not flying where you were expecting to go). And did you remember to turn off the heating?
There's always this undertow to the numbing nowhere, outside-time feel of airports, it's pumped up, pretending to be a somewhere. Pretending to be a destination. The numb must be designed in to try to keep down all that lo-fi/low-fly terror. Outside time, yes, but time is of the essence: miss that plane and you're screwed or your credit card will be.
As waitee, the tasks that shape the experience of departure have no meaning. There's only waiting. I'm here to meet my loved one, the returning angel, she I have missed. She's coming back. We have, if my arrival here means anything, survived our trial by separation. Alert to the pitfalls of what I wish for - or at least what I was wishing for six months ago - I note my nausea and anxiety with, well, more anxiety. Plenty of people swear by a stomach-calming tipple but an airport bar with its synthetic odour and chilly aircon is no place to be, in more ways than one. Really it's no place at all, is it? And anyway falling off a flight and into the arms of someone who smells of booze is not the welcome experience I am trying to offer.
I look for stars through the airport fug and attempt to feel romantic. But I feel desolate and too firmly planted in this mirage of a place to be uplifted. We're still together, but maybe only because of the complications of parting from an absence. At some point the longed-for phone calls became an expensive role play. The fear is that this is not going to be wiped away by her physical presence, which may just write large what I'm already (not) feeling. That I'll carry on telling her I love her when it's just a repetition, once more without feeling.
No! Her reappearance at the gate could instead put an end to this miserable loss of faith. The airport is a line we have to cross. Yeah, a frontier. She, like this place, is everything and nothing. She doesn't exist until she steps through that gate, until I see her.
I spend some time thinking about where to position myself for when, finally, she does get here. The flight's in and people begin to straggle through, now it's a stream. I'm trying hard to manufacture excitement every time someone appears, just in case. I pretend I'm not hoping that she isn't on the flight. Then I can be angry that she hasn't come back rather than angry that she has, or that she went away in the first place. I wish I hadn't come. I wish she hadn't left. I wish I hadn't met her so soon before she was going away. I wish I hadn't met her. And now here she is.
