The last time I was in an airport, a private company bamboozled me
into signing up for a trial of their security screening program and later
I was rueful about it and canceled. Even in errancy, I could pack a bag
and fly, before babies, before covid, was always self-assured at the
airport bar, lollygagging a last drink before my flight. Sixty percent
of the time I’m nauseous and trying to hide it. My body dissents in
any way involving ears or hives, so many birthdays flying between
hemispheres, as if being vaguely bilious, itchy or tipsy in concourse
whatever was my particular predicament. What counterforce changed
my fate? I’m not immune to immanent what-ifing or zero-sum thinking
that maybe I exchanged x for y, that I shouldn’t have done a stint
as a daytime bartender and dog walker, should have immediately
gone to graduate school, should have obediently followed an intelligible
path to something like a livelihood. But I don’t actually think that.
I wish I had more money, sort of. Coco screams because the pajamas
are wrong, then screams because she needs someone to be with
her while she screams. I’m at my screaming threshold. Parenting
is helping others when you feel like an incompetent wreck. I think
of escaping to the Cotswolds, walking between pubs and eating
chestnuts, Trevor helps Coco find not displeasing sleeping attire,
Earth holds me when I scream, or the car contains me while Earth
supports the car. Where am I, was I? Post-bath and bedtime, I
read about the status of the ceasefire talks in Gaza, Passover begins
tomorrow evening and I will go to work in this not really quagmire
of an Imperial capital. If it were swamp I’d love it more, but we are
sinking, I hope. I used to feel some vaguely magisterial presence
on the Lincoln Memorial steps. Maybe I need to go there and pray,
connect with some omnipresent collective grief, feel queasy and obscure
by the reflecting pool, drive thirty miles an hour part way round the beltway
at rush hour as if I lived in Maryland. Instead I bike to the studio, string
and unstring a loom, go to yoga, do a forward bend and then another,
again I wonder why no one has written an anthropology of airports. 48
hours in London, Heathrow. Why didn’t I get a hotel room? It’s now late
April and I am thinking of Moses’ adopted mother, the Pharaoh’s daughter,
how the Jews’ Egyptian neighbors gave them gold and silver and clothing as
they left Egypt. The song sparrows abandoned the nest and now above the
door a dove incubates her eggs How in Exodus The LORD seems
like an explanation not a cause. I can’t dispose of these contradictions.
In dreams I swim deep or float through various apocalyptic landscapes,
the flood is coming but I have learned to live in the water and my dream sea-
scape is calm. Sometimes I picnic in airports, imagine regime change,
sometimes a lover or friend brings me food and they are always a sign of
the dream’s plutonian dregs, a baseline for the sweetness and trauma
transforming. In the non-dream world the waters rise, too. When the end
comes, I’ll go to the Full Yum on North Capitol Street. I’ll bring my babies and sweethearts.
We’ll get pork egg fu young and beef chow fun to go, and then we’ll float.
