like shooting stars
It’s not yet 8 a.m. Central Time as I’m writing this, sitting at a charging station in the Chicago airport. I’ve already been awake for over five hours and have traveled hundreds of miles, with much longer still to go before I reach Billings, Montana, for a work conference.
I like traveling through airports because of the people-watching. So far today, I’ve marveled at two separate men in the security line who were holding literally nothing — no bag, no book, no neck pillow. I know that men’s pockets are incredible, but it baffled me that they needed nothing else. On my first flight, I listened as the no-nonsense flight attendant interacted with people around me (in a manner I might describe as sassy), then I privately smiled as the dad next to me told her, “I like the way you have about you.” I heard a toddler say they wanted coffee and a mother respond, “It’s too spicy.” At the charging station, I peeked over at what the guy next to me was scribbling as I worked on my conference presentation, but I couldn’t see anything on his notepad without stretching the limits of respectable people-watching.
While spending time in airports today, I remembered what Poppy said about airports in People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, which I reread last week by my parents’ pool:
“As a kid, I was a loner,” I explain, “and I always figured that when I grew up, I'd leave my hometown and discover other people like me somewhere else. Which I have, you know? But everyone gets lonely sometimes, and whenever that happens, I buy a plane ticket and go to the airport and — I don't know. I don't feel lonely anymore. Because no matter what makes those people different, they're all just trying to get somewhere, waiting to reach someone.”
I didn’t feel lonely before my trip nor do I feel lonely in the airport now, though I do hate to leave my husband and cats behind. But I do like traveling alone — being silent myself while listening to the conversations around me, or tuning out everything around me to read as much as possible. I like air travel because it means there’s really nothing I have to do other than get somewhere — be taken somewhere, really.
On the drive home from my parents’ house last week (Loui was driving, so once again I really just had to relax and be taken somewhere), we got on the subject of a song I hadn’t listened to in years but has been lodged in my brain since adolescence. I queued it up and we sang along: “Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? I could really use a wish right now, wish right now, wish right now.”
And now it’ll probably be stuck in my head all the way to Billings.