Everything Happened | vol. 240

somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond

Work travel ramped up a few months ago. My town is rural and the airport is over an hour away. There kept being problems with me taking either of our cars and parking at the airport for the duration. I was feeling panicked. My work mentor was like, just take an Uber, that’s silly. It’s going to cost the same as if you lived in the suburbs of a major metro area. I love when people tell me what to do.

So I’ve been in a lot of stranger’s backseats this fall. Sometimes it makes me feel like a celebrity or a politician, riding in the back. Usually, it just makes me feel like a child. I get carsick like an iPad kid from looking at my phone. I think about Eva Chen and the #evachenpose. The nerve to put your feet on someone’s car interior! The hunger to do so, anyway. It would feel so nice. For a moment, I consider if it would be ok if I did it in just my socks. No, I decide, that is somehow more perverse.

I force myself to look out the window, feet on the floor. It’s too warm in the car but being a consumer is embarrassing, so I don’t say anything. When I got in, the driver switched the music from African hip-hop to “Who Can It Be Now?" by Men at Work, which I deserved.

Nota bene

Once, I almost missed my flight despite being seated right there at the gate waiting. I was locked in trying to catch Pokémon on my phone. I missed every boarding group announcement as I fling Pokéballs at my AR creature acquisitions. Finally, they announce my government name over the intercom and that’s what manages to unjack me from the Matrix. They are about the close the gate. The gate attendant’s eyes pop out at me. “Girl, hurry!”

Tfw when they announce your name at Gate E5

In a Lyft to the airport in September, I ask the driver to turn around because I’ve forgotten my entire wallet at home. It adds 50 minutes to our trip. Nick has put my wallet in the mailbox outside for me so that the kids don’t see me. They’ve already thrown a fit about my departure. It’s not fair to do it to them again. I get the wallet and run. The front door cracks open as the driver reverses down the driveway. I obviously flatten myself against the backseat. “Are you hiding from your kids?” he asks me.

“One of them is waving so I think they know it’s you.”

I’m in a hotel in Austin, Texas and I order food directly to my room because I’m raggedy from air travel and don’t want to run into a coworker in the hotel. I’ve not met many of them irl and I don’t wish to be perceived in this state. My dinner, a mixed mezze platter, doesn’t include silverware. I wash my keycard with the hotel hand soap and use it to spackle babaghanouj to my tongue. Then, I take a shower hot enough to put me in the burn unit, eat half an edible, and fall asleep by 9 central.

I’m booking it through O’Hare, wearing my millennial mom uniform (Free People Hot Shot onesie in Washed Black), and feeling too ugly to be in public. The garment, chosen today for its roominess, is giving “inpatient behavioral psych” after a day of wear. My hair is always too much but it feels especially neglected, less boho and more “pet rescued from an animal hoarding situation.” I feel like I smell faintly of pee, and wonder if I dragged my pant leg across a wet airplane toilet floor without noticing. I wonder how anyone can feel chic when traveling. Like her, I think as I pass a woman who looks crisp and cool as hell. Her dark hair is pulled back in a chrome claw clip, and she’s wearing kelly green wool jacket in a chore coat shape.

I take two more steps and think, wait was that Taza?

I spin around on my heel to double-check, because nothing else interesting has happened that day. I see that she’s queueing for a flight to Phoenix, and yes, that is Taza. Still influencing, even by just looking clean while trying to fly home. She clocks me and an inscrutable microexpression crosses her face. I make it to my gate and text all the people who would need to know that I just saw Taza at O’Hare.

It’s August and I’m lining up to board a flight to Atlanta but I can’t find my phone. I start asking people at the gate if they saw anyone pick up a phone near where I was sitting. They have not, and they look at me with knowing pity. An annoyingly hot man asks me, do you want me to try calling it? “Weird way to ask for my number but sure,” I say and wink. He looks irritated but he laughs and I give him the number to dial. I don’t know what we expected to happen. But nothing happens. I deadpan, “Ok now DELETE that, I’m MARRIED!” and he makes a face I would describe as disgust. Lighten up, pal, life is short, you never know when you might lose your phone before work travel and completely torpedo the next few days of your life.

I can either board my flight with no phone, or I can miss my flight and probably also not find my phone. I board my flight. I immediately find my phone upon sitting down, zipped into one of the million pockets in my new bag. It’s on Do Not Disturb, and has two missed calls.

When the flight attendant breezes past closing overhead bins, she stops and looks at me. “Did your phone turn up?” I am always surprised when people in customer service can keep track of faces, even though I can still perfectly conjure the face of every problem customer from the restaurant where I worked 15 years ago.

“Yes!” I say, holding it up to her for some reason. “Someone found it.”

Her eyes light up like I’ve just told her my cancer is in remission. “Oh, wow! Where was it?”

“I had it..” I say, feeling certifiable.

When I try to explain the dread that I feel before traveling alone, there is an easy assumption. The assumption is that I am so devoted to the work of caring for my children, of never missing a moment, that I cannot bear it. Maybe a sense that I feel half-alive when away from them, or that I can’t sleep without the gentle whir of Nick’s CPAP machine in my ear.

Maybe there is an assumption, too, that I am nervous about Nick’s ability to do everything in my absence. And while the house becomes reliably trashed while I’m away, it’s Nick who always keeps track of spirit week and picture day forms and whatever is happening in the soccer team communication app.

It’s not those things, though, which is why I was puzzled by it for so long. Why am I spending the three days before I leave like I’m planning my own funeral? It’s only 20% due to the fact that if plane goes down and my children are motherless because of a flight taken to improve fair market value for my employer, then I will never stop screaming (from the afterlife) (will take the form of constant leaf-blower noise right next to where you are trying to have a conversation.)

But I figured it out. When I’m responsible for my kids, I can hold it together. I have to! When I’m responsible for myself only? My brain is porous, a colander. It’s a reverse Flowers for Algernon. I can’t keep my wallet or my phone from wandering, I can’t make a flight unless they shout my name at me, I marinate my Macbook in water for four hours in my backpack.

Nick picked me up from BWI this last time, my personal chauffeur. It means keeping the kids out late on a school night but it was his idea.

We were trying to locate each other in passenger pick-up. I get a call from him. “Evie! It’s so good to hear your voice..” Because of the time zones, and because we’re not really a “synchronous check-in” couple, we haven’t spoken all week.

“Talk fast because my phone is at 1%” I say to him. I picture us in a split-screen, it’s a romantic comedy, it’s an indie with heart, it’s my real life and I’ve been in airports and cabs and planes all day trying to get back to it.

I’m running, carrying my roller suitcase by its handle because it takes too long to drag it behind me. The kids are in the car, in pajamas, and they all chant my name as I hop in the front passenger seat. I am a bank robber. I am a god. I unplug Nick’s phone from the charger and plug mine in instead.

yr mate,
Evie
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