We arrived at the airport an hour early. My day had so far been filled with sitting on our beach in the backyard, miserably waiting. My brother Jack had sat on the sandy, ground with me all morning and all afternoon. No words had been shared except for the subtle “wow” or gasp when a wave and the sun sparkled with each other in just the right way. He had even silenced his cell phone just to sit. I inferred I was just a little bit closer to his heart than his girlfriend Emily, at least for now.
I won’t lie and say I didn’t appreciate this, but I expected to leave my pathetic excuse of a home the way I lived in it: alone and uninterrupted. To say sitting quietly with my brother watching the ocean for hours was exactly what I needed would be lie, as well.
Jack drove me too the airport, held my single bag for me, and waited for the airplane to come. I felt I owed him a “thanks” at least, so as he bought me a hotdog and I filled it will mustard and ketchup, I managed a muffled, “Thank you, Jack.”
He smiled and shook his head, “It’s a hot dog. It doesn’t cost more than surfboard.” I didn’t mean the hotdog but as I began to explain I caught his eye, and it told me he knew and it was enough. I shut my mouth and went back to chewing.
Waiting in an airport is a practice I hadn’t experienced often. After you got over the noise and sunk into the multi-colored background filled with stealthy thieves, liars, and overweight, loud families with one too many kids, you begin to appreciate the obliviousness of the average human being. Too everyone else, I was just another average girl, eating a hotdog, and talking with her mouth full. These people, who believed they were too busy and too important to pay attention to anyone that didn’t have to do with them, gave me, and everyone else who chose to take it, the power of invisibility. Suddenly, it seemed so easy to walk through a crowd, to examine the people around me, to even take or do whatever I wanted without being seen. This was the exact opposite of what I usually felt: the unstable belief that everyone was secretly staring and laughing as I walked away. I began to think of all the things I could do in a place like this, where I could disappear into the crowd and become no more than another civilian rushing through her day. I started to see things in a different perspective as the minutes with Jack ticked bye, one by one. Even to myself I no longer was me, but a spy, a watcher, a thinker. As a Korean boy walked past me in black shoes and a tie, I imagined he was on his way to meet his new best friend, a girl I had seen pass just minutes before. I imagined he would fall in love with her. I imagined their relationship would end when he got fired from his future job and she decided to leave him, because she was only interested in money anyways. I frowned and moved on to my next victim. An old man, dark as the night sky with no moon and no breeze, was sitting not too far from me, sleeping. But in my mind, he was awake as I was when floating on a board out at sea. He was a Russian spy, waiting for the other Russian spy in the room to give him a signal. I decided to let Jack in on my secret.
“Which man?” He laughed. I pointed and he looked at me. We both laughed out loud. “Did ever occur to you that he’s older than your grandmother?” He choked out.
“Ssshh, Jack. You’ll give us away.” I giggled, and leaned back in my chair. Then when the laughs were gone, “My plane should be here soon right?”
“Right,” The joking was over and we went back into our quiet, dangerous caves scientist like to call our minds. I was still smiling though, because no matter what I knew I still had one person who cared…
X
“So, call me and have fun.” He said as I boarded the plane.
“Okay, Jack, I’ll have loads of fun.” Yeah, whatever… I could tell I had strong feelings about this trip but I couldn’t make up my mind: did I want to go to get away from my dad, or did I want to stay to make sure I didn’t make this whole “change for the better” thing easy on him. Either way, as I walked onto the plane I realized whatever I felt, it was all based upon my father and that didn’t sit well with me at all.