Children like to dance at the airport. I’ve seen a boy once do cartwheels into a row of chairs. He picked himself up and did a few more in the opposite direction.
Today, there’s a little blonde girl with a plastic crown on her head and she keeps spinning on the toes of one foot. She’s poised like a ballerina and looks as good as those girls performing the Nutcracker on PBS. Even though I know she will fall, I’m slightly concerned when it happens anyway, this time because her crown is on its side rolling away. She giggles and gets back up and chases after it in a dizzying stupor. Then it’s on her head and she’s spinning again, and I’m looking at the crown with its red, blue, green, and purple jewels that become part of a carousel until they blur or she falls again.
She will keep doing this for another 29 minutes. I keep watching because this is the most entertaining thing that anyone is doing here.
There’s an old lady across from me who farts but isn’t ashamed because the brim of her floppy hat droops over her face. She’s sleeping, I guess. I suppose people fart in their sleep, and this is reasonable because burping in your sleep seems entirely unreasonable. The gas has to come out SOMEWHERE. There’s a business man poking at his PDA and a woman sitting with one leg crossed over the other, admiring her glossy fingernails as she cradles her cell phone between her ear and shoulder, talking about her latest round of marital issues. A tired mother rocks her restless baby; a boy staring at his Nintendo DS with thumbs pumping.
And me, I’m quietly looking at everyone else and taking mental notes. But I guess the point that I’m getting to is that we’re all existing in different times.
We’re time travelling. You must think I’m stupid for saying this because we’re all existing in the same room waiting to board the same flight at 3:45 pm and that it’s currently 2:33 pm on a Sunday afternoon, January 24th, 2010, to me and everyone else there. And that’s totally accurate.
But the girl that’s dancing is in the present and the guy making notes on his PDA is in the future and I’m in the past because everything I just wrote just now is a recollection of what’s already happened four days ago. And the woman who’s farting and may or may not be sleeping? I don’t even know what tense she’s in. But we’re all someplace else.
My mind wanders all the time.
Sometimes, I’ll be driving alone late at night. I’ll be winding through a road I’ve gone down a million times and my mind will start bending like the road in front of me. Although I’m not exactly losing focus (which I totally am if you think about it), I’ll start thinking about that conversation about God I had with a friend last week, or this pretty girl I like but won’t get to see until next Thursday, or the time years ago when two of my friends got high and walked through Safeway on pins and needles because one of them brought in Animal Crackers from home and thought that we were all going to be arrested because we were eating lions and elephants that we couldn’t afford, inside the store. The speed limit becomes an afterthought and the back of my mind tells me that I should turn off my high beams when cars are coming from the other direction because that’s the right thing to do and not because they might be temporarily blinded and crash into me.
I guess I can understand now why people drag out their friend who just got dumped by their significant other. Their present reality is so painfully incomprehensible that they need to replace it with an alternate one, one which grants them a perspective that will allow them to pick, with greater clarity, which timeline they want to resume their life in. Life doesn’t suck anymore. You’re already in the future. Someone else might see the whole action of going out to forget the breakup as a useless endeavor because the person in turmoil would simply be postponing the psychological torment for a later time and that tricking them into a plastic happiness is simply an evanescent illusion that would make the ensuing solitude that much worse. The guy who said that probably thinks he’s living in the future when he’s really stuck in the past. Or maybe that guy’s just stuck.
A little over two weeks ago, I had brunch with a friend. These are the important things: having a job (security), monitoring your current BMI (health and beauty), and not dying alone (love). That’s what she stressed, between dim sum and our post meal walk into some hills. There was fresh rain on the pavement and the world felt new. She talks about the older lady who told her about the man she married when she was young and in love. The man cheated on her and moved away with most of the money, leaving her alone in a big empty house. After that story, she’s telling me how she’s thinking about living in a particular neighborhood in a particular city because it’s a respectable enough place to live and no one will think less of her because where you live often reflects how much you earn which may or may not reflect your overall worth as a human being. The houses there are cute and they’re built on hills with views of the sea and she can just say that she likes living here just because it’s nice like that and this is reason enough for most people.
Then we’re in a bar and we’re talking about suicidal writers over cocktails. It’s probably just one in the afternoon. The bartender points to a gigantic buffalo head mounted on the other side of the bar. It’s a taxidermist’s wet dream and I didn’t realize it was even there and probably wouldn’t have if she hadn’t pointed it out. Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out while his family went about their usual business in the next room. Iris Chang put a revolver in her mouth as she sat in a car and pulled the trigger a few years after one of my other friends interviewed her for a middle school book report. Ernest Hemingway blew his brains out in Idaho with a shotgun, using his big toe to set the gun off.
This isn’t your everyday conversation but I’m glad I’m (t)here having it with her. That giant furry head with horns nailed to the bar is going to spend more time watching people get drunk than it has when it was attached to a body, roaming on an open plain with wind whipping in its face. I tip the bartender and we leave.
But here I am right now, writing. And I’m alive. I’m breathing. But I know I’m not HERE, NOW. But that’s okay because I have the choice to do so. And it’s important to know that you can travel whenever you want, WHEN you want. Pardon the redundancy but that’s the best way I can put it. Time travelling CAN create distance between events, a rift between people. The same time that mends broken hearts can also put a glass pane between you and the world. Knowing and feeling break their kinship. Mindless time travelling can prevent you from fully engaging yourself in an experience, from living the way you are supposed to. People can’t spend their lives watching themselves doing things in the third person.
That’s why I’ve been continuously watching the little girl in the airport who spins and falls and gets back up again to spin some more. She’s waiting for an airplane ride that she doesn’t care about to deliver her from her naïve and limited appreciation of time to someplace else in another time zone, touching down on another day, and finally walking amongst total strangers who share no history – no real time - with her.
But I think she’ll be fine if she keeps on dancing.
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