Traveling Alone

After the sad awkwardness of farewell, the day’s mine to do with as I like. Doors slide open at my approach. Everything I need I’ve got, packed in the bag that swings at my side.

I step boldly to the counter, where the ticket agent recites his litany of questions: have these bags left your possession; no they have not left my possession; have you been given anything to transport by persons unknown to you; I have not been given anything by persons unknown to me. Are you traveling alone today; what is your ultimate destination? Scrawling a gate number in grease pencil with a casual movement like an absolution, he sends me on my way.

Today I’m a traveler, a person suspended. Today I’ll do only what’s asked, writing my address on a tag, showing proof of identity, waiting. Keep Walking. Do Not Stop or Turn Back reads the sign. Guiding a bin into the scanner’s dark mouth. Removing coat and shoes, passing irradiated through an open door, barefoot as a pilgrim. Allowing bespectacled guards to scrutinize my face, body, belongings, furrow-browed guards rationing words of greeting, dismissing me with a nod.

Other travelers crowd the concourse, some running down the carpeted aisle, some strolling, killing time. Even so, I am alone. I see nobody familiar and would be surprised if I did. Icons line the halls; in a mural, Ronald McDonald pilots an open-cockpit plane as the Hamburgler drops bags of fries on a sleeping city. Snoopy; Starbucks. A city name emblazoned on a T-shirt.

Canny moneymakers, knowing the addictive qualities of distraction, supply the terminals with televisions and cocktail lounges. A woman, paging through a celebrity newsmagazine she will not buy, absently tugs at her necklace. A man stretches across a row of vinyl seats, briefcase pillowing his head, eyes shut. Others talk on phones or fill out crosswords. But I see a few staring into middle distance, eyes on the floor. What do they think of? Can we know each other at all?

Takeoff pushes me back in my seat, amazing me as it always does, this everyday miracle. High above middle America, I see thin roads pressed at even intervals into mountain valleys, brown winter land crumpled and silent. Flashes of green iridescence: highway signs. Pale clusters of cul-de-sacs, roads whorled as fingerprints, cleared red land ready for a new subdivision. “Knoxville,” says the captain, and what I see shapes itself into known things, the long plank of Tennessee. Afternoon rushes away from me as I doze in my thinly padded seat, waking when the plane tilts. Now pale snow coats the far ground, and blue-black shadows scallop the hills; a red strand of taillights lines a highway. The moon burns cold behind my ear.

Going home is traveling in time to a life I once had; it should be impossible, wrought by spell casting if at all, to visit these places I see in dreams. A lacebark elm grew outside the east window of that first apartment. Bright sun through its leaves woke me every morning, and its branches rattled the glass during storms. That time is gone. But then I board a plane, and in an afternoon travel back two years or twenty. I press fingertips to the elm, whose branchlets are already, late February, forcing out yellow green leaves. No wonder airports are places of threat and confusion; of freedom, tears, small dramas, and petty cash. Here all times of a life can meld. (When the plane touches down, the attendant reminds the travelers to reset their watches to the proper hour.) Here I recognize no one; my own face, in the restroom mirror, surprises me.

I walk the covered gangway with my fellow travelers. Together we’ve been shaken by turbulence high above the ground; together we pass through the arrival gate and breathe the stale air of the waiting area with its sealed plate glass windows. Together we relearn how to walk the curving earth, gliding past those who lean against walls waiting for their flights, or stand in line to buy the local paper with its unfamiliar masthead, or disappear into the hazy enclave of the smokers’ lounge. But our temporary solidarity recedes with every step, its last traces floating away as I ascend the escalator, searching the crowd for faces that look a little different every time.

As I walk away from the airport, I keep thinking of the other travelers, nameless to me; we have all stepped through the portal, repeated our throwaway vows. Every trip is in practice for the next. This is how to keep yourself malleable, moving from city to city. Sometimes I think I know these strangers better than those I return to, the ones who never left. Then the day of traveling ends. And I become as they are, until I take up my discipline again.