introspective periscope : peeking inside since Y2K ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- notes on my traveling summer & the two women T-minus 9 days and counting - twentieth of august-back to stormy skies- "how does a duck know what direction south is?."~crash test dummies right. okay. so. this is the week after the weekend before the weekend i've been waiting for. clarity? wow. i've been doing a lot of traveling this summer between two cities and that would have to account for my not writing as often as i'd like. it has, however, subjected me to all sorts of characters i'd otherwise never get to meet. i've been traveling between music city, Nashville, Tennessee, and steel city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for about six months now. i go when and as often as i can between my busy work schedule and ridiculously hectic social life. and seeing as the latter is virtually not at all, i board the flights to the south a few weekends a month. "but how can you afford to fly so often?" simple. i've been granted the fickle luxury of flight. okay-flying for free. my mother works for one of the leaders in the airline industry and until i am twenty three years old (provided i am a full time student, which, as we know, i was until this spring when i up and put a fierce end to that hootenanny) i get some flight priveleges. woot. hoorah for me. (no, K...you cannot have a free ticket. no, k. my mother does not hate you. now...can i please have another altoid?) so. with the impending birthday of mine coming in nine days, i have been trying to get in the last amounts of travel to see the infamous T von Tennessee while the travelin's good. or something. i fly south again in three days and will revel in the road trip back north that will be ours. and then south again. and then north again. pattern? yes, i think its obvious. i'm getting to the point. yes, there is a point. it was hinted...ah, foreshadowed, even...just a tad bit earlier. in my travels, i have collided with single serving friends and have gawked at some of the most interesting characters in the world....well, the world between nashville and pittsburgh, anyway. i have encountered a slew of diamond-bedecked vampyresses in their mid-fifties (whats that in vampyre years, exactly?), southern-talkin' cowboy hat wearin' dandies who laugh at their own not-so-humorous humor, kind ticket counter workers (especially the lovely Sam) as well as stern ticket counter workers who, T insists, are 'just doing their job'...and a multitude of others. of all of these people and gouls with whom i've shared glances, conversations, greetings, and airspace, two particular characters in the story of my life stand out strongly in my memory. i don't know either of their names, though i could easily have looked at a name tag or asked in conversations shared...and yet, i haven't. i think i prefer the anonymity all the same. I see one every time I pass her in the concourse at the airport...she works in one of the food venues. I never understand how she can come to the airport every day and never leave town. And the other, I met only on Friday...but she has frequented my thoughts a hundred times already. because of them, i'm learning to find strength I didn't even know I had. this is for them. -The Strength of Two Women- when i got off the bus, i was roaming and sleepy it was sunday morning airport air and overcast skies through tinted glass and earlier than i should've liked to have been awake and there she was at the steakery... i was so amused that the resteraunts were really open this early on a sunday. and she was like clockwork who never knew sleep or needed it as she greeted each customer systematically took orders and filled them took money made change napkins and packets of sugar. so i stood in line, half awake half asleep and waited my turn and placed my simple order: just coffee. just coffee. and she smiled and breathed as if thankful for the break from breakfast-hungry familes on vacation and business suits that barely took the time from the person on the line of their cell phone to regard her and place an order. "just coffee." and while i stood there and listened to the machine in her voice, i wondered how she could come there every day, to the airport with its arrival gates and departures late and the beeping cars and the fast pace whose hunger knows no peak time, never slowing to remember to breathe. i wondered how she could come there every day to the airport and never go any further... mustn't she wonder about the places those machines have seen? but she comes and she goes and she does her shift daily, giving men in suits their coffee and cartons of milk for the babies and she goes home to god knows what but i hope its something better because i could never do her job... she is stronger than i. i could never come this far only to stop. she is stronger than i. and i got on the plane when my row was called stowed my things and watched the others file in. and she struggled with a few bags and a little girl in her arms and i could see age in her twenty one year old eyes, age that my nearly twenty three year old hazels don't yet comprehend. and all i wanted was to sleep away that time on the plane so i could get to you, having come this far and not been able to stop... but her baby was crying and she was trying so hard to get her to sit down that eventually, all i could do was converse. "so why did you drive back from nashville to your beautiful desert with your beautiful baby?" "didn't you think i'd be faster to fly?" "and what have the deserts got to offer that these rolling hills don't hold?" tell me, young mother, how you left him behind? didn't your heart break when you shut the door and turned the ignition? how did you get farther than five miles without him? she's stronger than i to leave him behind this one that she loves who fathers her babies one almost two years and a second on the way and younger and stronger than i who cannot stop turning around to mouth familiar words to the face that waits for me to disappear. she is stronger than i. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .what came before. - .what happened next. a diamond at the bottom of the drain - 20 october 2017 |
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