1. Departure Lounge

1. Departure Lounge

A series of stops and starts and queues. Of waiting in simple lines, by checkout desks and metal detectors. In time I’m given to kill I think about snowstorms and gas bills and books leant but never returned. A decision: beer in green bottles or coffee from paper cups? Oh you always could be relied on to provide a solid decision. Sharing a stage with the lost and the grounded and the stricken and the lonely. Details: Irrelevant, for you discounted all vital information. I look at the uniformed employees. Static witnesses surrounded by all else that moves. Tell me where did our sitcom dreams go? Of sitting around a shared table with alcohol and endlessly trading stories. Of a place where we never felt the need to fill time or silence or an awkward pause. Of pool and jukeboxes and ‘ok, I’ll have one more’ when rain comes down outside.

Having finished crosswords and drinks, I orbit around the travelators and the trolleys. Complete my seventeenth complete circuit, still waiting to leave. Think about the last time I took a flight alone. Coming Home. For funerals or holidays. Awkward social situations and seeing those long lost friends that you never wished to see. Never who you imagine, in a movie scene you’ve scripted, in a strangely apt location.

You’re at home now. With the paint stripper and the bugspray. Commencing home improvements in my stead, whilst I’m away. Buy a notebook and try to write lists of lists I need to make.

Why I cannot seem to focus,

Books I own but have not read,

A series of minor terrors that paralyze me when I lie in bed.

Taking the opportunity to buy supplies. A map, some drawing pins, a bottle of foul tasting local liqueur. Write postcards to all my small regrets, send them off with novelty stamps and a heartfelt desire to never return.

Departure boards flash fresh delays with macabre glee, and nobody can provide any new information. I take the opportunity, provided by isobars and high pressure, a lack of instant ready meals and industrial action. List all the ways, to provide delays, keep me here forever.

I head for the roof, for the observation platform, borne from a desire to see planes that aren’t even there. Stand upon the concrete, shifting feet, as the occasional workman crosses a horizon. Wishing I took up smoking when I was a kid, I switch off my cell.

I hear your reasons not to be here as I try to identify airlines from insignia sticking out of hangars. And sit down on the step, watching runways being covered by snow, wait until I cannot feel my fingers, wait until things start again.