On Transience, Matters of the Heart, Random Encounters, and Other Airport Wonderings
It’s 3AM. I’m standing in line for the mundane security check, my head dizzy from the wine and hash. At least this time I made it past check-in, not with plenty of time to spare, but with just enough that I know I’ll make it safely onto that plane. Maybe it’s because this time I’m more excited to travel than previous times. Or maybe I’ve just learnt my lesson, albeit the hard way. In my own unfortunate past experiences, missing flights usually make for thrilling stories, but there’s nothing actually fun about being confronted with the reasons why you let yourself miss them in the first place. I don’t particularly get a kick out of having to ask myself existential life questions, the answers to which I usually don’t have, nor out of spending unnecessary money on new flights — the price you pay for reckless behaviour.
Still in line, I’m in a state of fuzzy contemplation. One step ahead of my former self from an hour ago, right before I left for the airport from my home in Beirut, and one step behind my future self from midday tomorrow, once I’ll have arrived at my final destination, Berlin. What lies in the middle is a long stretch of no-man’s-land, of waiting, reflection, anticipation, re-running certain scenarios, mostly blurry ones, in my head. Too much overthinking, not enough rationalizing. The perfect concoction for passing excess time.
The clinic-like bright lighting helps expose the commonalities between all us travellers. Yet, each one is more different than any superficial scan of the room could possibly reveal. Nevertheless, as we stand in line in awkward proximity to one another, the unflattering beams above our heads highlighting all of our features and flaws equally, from the blotchy skin tones to the fatty pores bursting with grease. From the curly hairs springing out of the unbuttoned top halves of men’s shirts to the array of botoxed lips and tattooed eyebrows. From the rivulets of tears running down my sweat-glistened face, marking crusty fault lines across my powdered cheeks, to the distressed faces of the two girls concerned with why they weren’t given their second boarding passes at check-in. They ask an officer in charge but he fails to relay the necessary information, instead asking them pointless questions, wasting precious time, and fueling their already seething anxiety. So I intervene and tell them they’d receive the passes for their connecting flights once they transit in Turkey. They pause for a moment before seeming reassured the information is accurate, and then proceed to inhale a breath-full of oxygen into their compressed lungs, their bodies finally regaining composure and their tightened muscles relaxing as they smile and thank me.
Nobody’s anonymous in these sluggish snake-lines; it’s part of our human nature to stare at one another in utter fascination – out of boredom, and in search of momentary distraction. What is everyone’s story? Where are they coming from, where are they headed? I scan the passports clutched tightly in people’s hands. Mostly Syrian, Lebanese, and a random collection of European passports with their thick mauve covers. How many years did they wait before receiving these tiny booklets representing such big dreams, for a future full of boundless freedom and mobility? How many seas were crossed, flights and trains boarded, documents procured, phone calls made, interviews attended, forms filled, boxes ticked, languages learnt, certificates obtained, hearts broken, tears shed? Immeasurable perseverance and patience, frustrations and resentments. Unlike mine, granted to me at birth before I could even speak. Each passport holder has their own unique story, and each one represents the inequalities of this fucked up world that privileges certain people over others. And yet here we are, all standing in line together under this horrendous white light, all waiting to move forward in the queue, to get on our respective flights, and to join whomever is waiting for us on the other end.
As I stand, scanning my surroundings and reflecting, I feel my eyes well up again, trickling tears of a fresh “heartbreak” because a boy had just told me he would never be able to love me back. He didn’t see it going anywhere. Couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t want to. The exact replica of a situation I had found myself in just before I traveled to Italy several months ago. It didn’t really matter how or why, it just mattered that the dejection of unrequited feelings yet again palpitated right through my sore heart, hitting a place already tender and fragile. Not from a lost love, for the seedling was still too small to tell whether it had the capacity to bloom into something real or not. But the seedling had been harshly cut off from its sources of sustenance, barely two weeks since its initial unexpected consummation, depriving it from the possibility to grow any further. Perhaps I had spoken too soon, the hopeless romantic in me yearning to express what feelings were brewing inside me and daring to breathe some hope into this fledgling little affair. Axed, just like that. A love that could be but never will. Saudades de um amor que nunca haverá. The Brazilians know all about it, longing for a love that will never be. This melancholic feeling of missing the imaginary, missing what the present and future are depriving you of before you even get the chance to experience it for real.
My mind transports me to an earlier scene, while I was still at the check-in desk. A mother stood desolate and surrendered with her eleven-year-old daughter Selina. She had booked their tickets back to the Netherlands via a Syrian travel agency, but their reservation was not appearing on the system. Had something simply gone wrong or had she been scammed? I tried helping her look for alternative flights directly via the airline’s website, but there were none headed to neither the Netherlands nor Germany until mid-next week. I hoped the agency would be able to help her fix this fuck-up, but with the ever-mounting stories of scams and frauds, you learn to become naturally skeptical and untrusting. “You prepare everything ahead of the trip, even mentally, only to be told you don’t have a seat on the flight,” she said, despondent. Selina, meanwhile, looked at me distracted, her curious eyes twinkling as she smiled, visibly eager to say something irrelevant to the troubles preoccupying her mother.
“Khawaftini,” Selina tells me as I’m given my boarding pass. She said I’d frightened her.
I give her a puzzled look, my eyebrows raised in bemusement, and then remember “Ahh. Lesh? La’no shoftini ‘aam bebki ‘abl?” I asked if it was because she’d seen me crying earlier.
“Eh.” She confirms, then asks me how old I am. I ask her to guess my age. She says 23. I giggle through my teary eyes and thank her.
“Wallah shukran! Ya ret, bas ‘omri 33!” — I wish, but I’m actually 33!
Her mother laughs, pointing out the 10-year gap between her daughter’s guess and my actual age. I ask Selina if I could give her a hug and she leans in to embrace me with such heartfelt warmth and affection that for a moment it feels like I’m hugging my own sister. I ask how long they’d been in Holland for; it had been years. Selina’s Dutch is perfect. She asks me, “Hoe gaat het met jou?” I smile at the irony of her fluent Dutch when I can barely pronounce my own Dutch surname. She left her war-torn homeland when she was just a child to resettle in the birthplace of my father, and she’ll grow up to be more Dutch than I ever will.
This feeling in the pit of my stomach — it’s as if my intestines have tied themselves into a knot that continues to grow tighter and tighter in an attempt to distract my heart from its own growing pangs of pain. I’d surrendered to love, and love had once again defeated me. But I know that this is a very real part of the process, that each time I open myself up to potentially loving someone new, I risk another part of my already-eroded heart from chipping away. Perhaps, however, these broken pieces will actually make me stronger and will teach me valuable life lessons that will accompany me forever. One thing I know is that I have not and will not lose the will to love. In fact, I will continue to fall up in love, because that is the only way I know how to live.
I get past security and make my way to the gate, with generous time to spare before boarding the plane. I picture Selina’s warm smile, the after-effect of her loving embrace sends a wave of peace and calm through my body that soothes the knot in my stomach and slows down my erratic heartbeat. I take a deep breath and feel my entire being soften up. Nothing like a random encounter with a stranger in the transience of an airport of a transient city to help bridge the gap between one end and a new beginning. I’m ready to embark on my next journey, open to whatever adventures this new chapter has in store.
