It’s nearing midnight in the American Airlines terminal at LAX. Gate 42B. These marbled and carpeted floors have become all too familiar territory. This is my fourth flight in seven days and I am tired, exhausted, ready for home, though technically I am here already.
I wanted this, I think, though I never thought about the complications that face the constant traveler: my offensive carbon footprint, changing in bathroom stalls, brushing my teeth in front of strangers, crying babies and flight delays.
I sit in a chair that’s intended to conjure up some 1970s vision of futuristic modernity, my legs propped up on the olive green rolling luggage my ex-boyfriend gave me as I was moving out of the apartment we shared. “You should take it,” he said. “You’ll use it more than I will.”
Gee, another thing to remind me of you? Thanks.
I took it anyway. As I suspected, I used to think about him whenever I used it. Now I don’t, because he’s not a ghost anymore, though I have plenty of ones who have taken his place.
Beyond a group of aging passengers and a walkway flooded with late-night travelers, the word “Qantas” is framed by a large glass window. QANTAS. Big and bold and always next to American Airlines. Its stupid white kangaroo in perpetual bounce, not unlike my sanity. I didn’t want to think about him anymore, the Australian, but reminders of him kept getting thrown in my face.
Flight attendants sip on frothy coffees, standing in a circle in their pointed heels and black tights, their chapped lips and their dry curls. My ex-ex-ex-boyfriend’s mother was a flight attendant. I still remember things like that.
I pick at the stretch cotton of my black leggings. My travel wardrobe is an exact science now, precise in its utility. Fading black leggings afford me comfort and warmth that denim cannot always provide. My leather jacket with the frayed blue silk lining is most often the perfect second skin. Under the jacket and over the leggings, a giant button-down shirt says, “I’m not pajamas, but I might as well be.” If only everything in life were so predictable and measurable, if you could only always be prepared for life’s host of known variables. I am becoming exhausted by life’s unknowns.
My leggings are dirty from too much traveling and not enough washing. That’s the problem with having a uniform, but not having duplicates. For some reason I’d rather not think about, the fabric itches my skin until the itch and my skin become friendly enough and the itch can be ignored.
I look at my watch. It’s 3 a.m. in New York. I’m seeing the sheep I should be counting as they jump to their deaths from office windows. The short hours I have to catch up with the inevitable jetlag are disappearing. I’m tired from too many dinners, too many coffees, too many obligations with friends I love too much.
I don’t know what Los Angeles means to me any longer. I love it like an abusive parent, in some weird, obligatory, compulsory way. I love the trees and the little houses. I love the dinner parties and the conversations I have with friends while standing in their large kitchens. But I hate other things so vehemently. The driving, the isolation, the nagging suspicion that life is flying past you at a pace so rapid, you’ll wake up next year and be 93 years old. The city rots in its own convenience. A ship sinking slowly in a beautiful sea.
Across from me,, I watch a row of over-lit Sees candies being restocked by two people in gray, too old to be working at a candy kiosk in the airport. I imagine time went by quickly for them. I imagine they didn’t envision that their lives would end up like this, refilling white boxes of Dark Chocolate Bordeaux and sticks of rich caramel lollipops.
Thao comes on my headphones.
Oh, no!
How can you stand it?
When I run
When I run
Like a bandit.
I wear him
Like a habit
In the lining of my jacket.
More ghosts. It reminds me of that same ex-boyfriend, the one with the luggage, when he still loved me some years ago. He used to walk me to my car because he lived in a beautiful old building in some shit part of Koreatown. It reminds me of driving through a particular street in Hancock Park, listening to classical music in somebody else’s car. It reminds me of the clementines he put into my bag before work and the night he looked over at me and said, “I think this could be good for awhile.” My memories of him seem so far away now.
I’m never gonna leave
And you’re never gonna leave
But you’re never gonna love me like I need.
Too often songs were prophecies.
Someone texts me. Someone new. He’s flirting and I’m flirting, my legs propped on my ex-boyfriend’s bag, his songs in my ears, some airplane to another ex-boyfriend’s homeland beyond my shoulder. Past and present and some thing I am convinced is my future, all here in this small, infinite space that is my brain.
These days, my life feels like a Tierney Gearon photograph, at once so many things. Layers of conflicting images, juxtaposed and pulling. Layers of the me I am and the me I’m not and the me I can be but can’t see yet. Life and death and new and old, wrapped in this singular shot that is meant to encapsulate so many impossible things. A life superimposed, never finished, and perpetually in some state of development in the dim light of a darkroom. Or the fluorescent terminal of an airport.
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Really enjoying your last few pieces. This was wonderful. Nice job.