Airports

You will find them in transitional places. Places where people travel through. Places where people don’t live.

Airports. Bus terminals. Train stations.

The more you are in places like those, the better chance you have at seeing one of them.

Maybe you’ll catch one. Maybe one’ll catch you.

If you’ve been dead to them, they’ll wanna touch you. Hold you. If they’ve been dead to you, you’ll probably want to do the same.

Sometimes they’ll dress so different or talk so different from the person they are to you that you won’t even notice them. They’re just some foreigner. Some body dressed like it was ten years ago. And they’ll never have met you anyway. Never had you as their child. Or dated you. Or fucked you.

Sometimes, though, they’ll recognize you, you’ll recognize them, but they won’t expect the relationship you have with them. They’ll expect something else. Maybe something better, maybe something worse. There’s never enough time to figure it out.

I’ve met several people like that. I met an ex-girlfriend that way, when I was on my way to Dallas. I hadn’t parted on the best of terms with her. But this one wasn’t her exactly because her version of me and her had parted on better terms. She had slid her tongue in my mouth and told me she’d missed me, and that she’d see me soon.

I didn’t know what she meant and I didn’t have time to ask. We both had a plane to catch.
I ran into my mother on the way to New York. She had been dead for some time then, and this particular her, still bald from the chemotherapy, thin and frail but surviving like ivy on a cliff face. I knelt down and told her I loved her, and I thanked for living as long as she had. She shed a tear then, and asked if she was dreaming, because I’d been dead so long.

Her flight left soon after I hugged her one last time.

On my way to Tampa I saw a friend of mine, just barely. The sleeve of his jacket tucked into his pocket; no arm filling it. He had a scar across his face that slithered up his face under the gauze taped over his eye. He was built mostly the same, but had coldness in his remaining eye. I asked if I could buy him a drink and told me only if I’d kill some lieutenant next time I saw him. I don’t know what he meant.

I’m sure he would have killed me if he didn’t have a plane to catch.

I was flying to Boston when I saw an old girlfriend, who insisted we find a bathroom to fuck in. I told her we couldn’t, and I had places to do, but I wanted her at that point as much as I wanted the girl who I dated who was just like her. She shrugged and said we could just do it when we got home. I told her we certainly would, knowing that the next time she saw me it wouldn’t be me. As I watched her plane take off I wondered if I had gotten another me laid that night. I wondered if perhaps I should have taken her up on her offer, but I knew I couldn’t.

We both had a plane to catch.