Air Portal
This is San Francisco International Airport and I can’t understand a single word the people ahead of me are saying. It’s very reassuring. I’m tired of living in a monoculture. White Americans end up all looking the same. Compared to everyone else.
I think the ones in front of me are speaking Dutch. They’re tall and elegant and seem to me somehow more relaxed, more cautious and more forgiving than specimens of the monoculture. I may be projecting here, but they’re definitely in shape from all that bicycling. Waiting alone in a row of vinyl seats is a middle-aged Japanese woman, missing her family, clutching her purse and some grace that my Western mind can barely comprehend. Just ahead of them is a dark-skinned family speaking an African language I can’t place. Maybe I’ve never heard it before. I don’t know the sense of what they’re saying, but the rhythm is familiar, those big hollow sounds and white smiles. It makes me smile too, remembering the smell of a night-time street restaurant in Bamako.
I say over and over again: there is a world out there. It was always waiting to become part of me, and there are parts of me still out there. I cried a little to hear about the shootings at Leopold’s, the cracked marble floors of that old Bombay staple. I once shared a sweating bottle of Kingfisher there with a very cute Russian, so It’s mine now. It’s all mine. I see the Arc de Triomphe in a movie and I’m reminded that I own Paris.
I stand in line in the terminal and once again I’m everywhere. I’ve already said goodbye to my friends; I’m already among strangers. I’m already gone, and I suddenly I don’t know what happens next. That’s my favorite part.
