Waiting Area :: April 16th, 2002 ::
I drove down to Chicago on Sunday afternoon to pick her up. It was Midway airport, which always seems to be apocalyptically busy. There’s never anywhere to stop. The design of the place insists that you keep moving. I got there and I tried to find her flight on the bank of computer screens marked “arrivals,” but her flight wasn’t on there. Strange, I thought. I hadn’t realized how important those flight trackers were until then. My girlfriend’s flight, which was supposed to land in less than a half hour, wasn’t displayed. I imagined there was there an accident. Or maybe when she said she would be arriving at 5:05 she meant a.m., not p.m.? Would I find her somewhere in the airport, glowering and abandoned, waiting amongst the throngs of unhappy travelers? Had this all been my fault?
I found some Southwest Airlines people who were helpful enough to tell me that the flight was OK, that it was in fact 20 minutes early and it would be landing any minute.
I walked to the second level to meet Jessamyn as soon as she came out from the other side of the security checkpoint. There’s a platform there, which the Midway staff have termed a “waiting area,” despite the fact that there is nowhere to sit except for a 6-inch tall steel shelf that ran along the wall. I sat next to a middle aged construction contractor who was intermittently checking messages on his ancient, cantankerous cellular phone and swearing at no one. (Come to think of it, he may have been swearing at all of us; who can tell?) We began talking. We talked of missing the exit on to I-55, of improbable and violent weather patterns, of the insufferability of travel since the US seems to have criminalized air travel in the past eight months. It was a good Midwestern conversation.
But when I saw Jessamyn come from behind two people walking in front of her, I had to cut it short. I could tell she was weary from traveling, that she was coming out of that trance that plane travel seems to induce. I wanted to be there.
