LAX
(13/12/2011 at Los Angeles International, waiting for a flight home)
I have never experienced a place so joyous and saddening at the one time.
So many people being greeted by loved ones with hugs and adoring kisses
and people being held in arms that are trying to make up for lost time
and maybe many more people waving that sad, long goodbye
and the echoing “I’ll miss you”’s – the lingering “I love you”’s - through the departure lounge, maybe never to be waved at or seen again at all
and the crying baby that screams for an eternity in time because it never really knows what’s going on at all.
What is even more crushing is the intense thought that this is happening simultaneously around the whole world.
Emotion is universal.
China, India, Africa, Thailand, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Japan, You Name It.
it’s all happening. The gateway to Human Emotion and Time itself is constantly open and flinging bodies across borders and languages and time zones and gaping chasms of valleys and oceans,
and either bringing them home to weeping and ecstatic hearts or tearing them away from their doorstep and wisping them across voids to land them somewhere new.
And the waiting game you are forced to play for 12 hours as you watch plane after plane take off and land in the exact same spot.
The waiting game that is played by windows, in coffee shops, burger bars, pizza joints, at restaurant tables, in departure lounges
where a child coughs in your ear and makes you fearful of TB
The waiting game where you feel so exasperated from the excitement of going home that you’re on the edge of your skin and your eyes feel like human pools of emotion.
We all know it’s difficult to rival the sadness of an empty theatre. What, with all the rows and rows of empty, dust filled chairs and the blank silver screen showing no ones dreams
and the harrowing sound of nothing.
But airports come close…
They are only redeemed by the righteousness of pure happiness I see in people’s eyes when they come home to open arms, full of love.
