Steve’s dad wears a baseball cap featuring the logo of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle company. The wind in the airport parking lot on the vast flat plane of Oklahoma was so strong that his hat blew away away across the pavement.
We carried our luggage through the doors into the air conditioned hallway with elevators and gift shops and escalators between us and the terminal. Like all airports, it’s a liminal space. Time and space work differently at airports, bus stops, and train stations.
At the threshold of the TSA checkpoint, Steve’s mother hugged me and said “Take care of B—-.”
I said I would.
As is customary, his family stood and watched us walk away until we were out of sight.
We live so far away.
On the airplane at night you can look down and see a web of electric lights – patches of light near towns and cities, darkness where nobody lives.
We are back safe.
Only once during this adventure did I burst into tears and sob and cry and say “I hate it here. I want to go home,” and contemplate leaving dramatically in order to run away to the woods in an angry panic. But I also sometimes do that in the car during trips to the grocery store, and I was secretly just upset because I tried shooting pool for the first time in my life in the back room of a vegetarian barbeque joint in a sketchy part of Memphis and I was not immediately good at shooting pool. I was bad at something I’d never done before, in front of his mum, and the embarrassment stung – hot and sharp and angry. It had been a long day. I felt I needed to hide what I was feeling from everyone, as aggressively as possible. It was getting difficult.
“It takes practice,” his father said, practically. (Which made it worse. So much worse. Devastating. Yuck.)
I want to learn how to shoot pool and I don’t want to be witnessed learning until I already know how.
My mental image of being of a hot butch in a flannel drinking whiskey shooting pool in a bar in the evening to impress the girls in spite of my fun sized trophy husband has been shattered and I don’t know if my ego can take any more of this.
Anyway.