arrival & departure (a list of airports)

I'm way too tall for window seats, but I still always insist on them.

Didion says that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. I tell myself stories about airports.

O’Hare was my favorite for almost two years, the long hallways, the low blue ceilings. There’s a Midwestern light show between terminals, you dive down a vertiginous escalator whose glass enclosing walls reflect the sky. They never failed to tell me how pretty I was. I was always all lipstick in O’Hare, all begging reaction, skirts and heels.

I used to go back to LaGuardia as though it were a living room, easy and careless to impress, my shoes off, my makeup smeared, careening with a bag that spilled one last garter belt and paperback. In the seven am blue and the flat four pm sunlight I traded flimsy standby passes for first class seats and arrived in Chicago drunk on 10am champagne and with a crush on the sweet girl flight attendant. I just needed a cigar and a lipsticked collar to complete the story. LaGuardia was where I first met B, the grimy airtrans baggage claim where he arrived small and panicked in a british band’s t-shirt and corduroys. He said in an email that I’d recognize him because he’d be the boy carrying his heart in his hands, but that was silly because that’s what everyone looks like in an airport.

JFK is the big promises, it’s what I think of when my eyes get wide at the verb ‘go.’ Here it’s always the international terminal and my heart pounding like a basketball on a summer blacktop. There’s a big swooping on-ramp to the drop-off area where on that one Fourth of July Gwen and John sped me to the curb in their getaway van and dropped me off fast, safe from pursuers. In the interior everything looks like a shopping mall and is big as the atlantic, promising an ocean crossing with a gesture to match the 19th century’s steamer trunks and class-divided liner decks.

There is no competition, and no point in mincing words: Heathrow airport is my favorite. I am madly, sticky hands and wet heart, in love with Heathrow, its ordered whites and greys, the five-story ceilings at baggage claim, all the exit-corridors where I have had early-morning, rubbing-eyed mishaps with payphones, and the black cabs with their huge backseats breathing long air through a taunting ribcage. Oh, Heathrow, let’s sneak around a corner away from the party and grab each other’s faces and breath hard. The little London houses, green moss and old red-brown brick, prepare autumn for the coming year like a marinade, and the trains and the cabs run oiled routes down to the city in cool absolute greys. London is the fog that cools down a sticky summer, that takes an american adolscent hysteria to a cocktail party and teaches it good manners that make it stop crying.

I barely remember Florence but that it was so disorganized and bright-colored that it might have been constructed of tissue paper and flowers. Or maybe that was Milan.

There is a long stretch of factory-ugly between Vienna the city and Vienna the airport, and the only things to eat in the food kiosks are cake and schnitzel. There really is a schnitzel kiosk. I think there was more than one. Vienna was where I had an airport security experience indistinguishable from an internet fetish video.

Barcelona was made of concrete somewhere between a very edgy art installation and a parking lot and all the signage promised summer would never end as long as you never left and kept buying soda and potatoes.

Frankfurt was a funhouse made of glass, so many panels so uninterrupted by any other material that I had to believe they were going to shatter at every next moment and tried to walk as light as I could, hoping it would be the group from the next flight, and not mine, who would reap the harvest when the mirror-shards burst.

Dublin was mostly under construction, but it was late at night and the plane was very small which meant that in the middle of the night I walked my big boots and frilly skirt across a tarmac alone, in the dark, and if you’ve never felt free like the word singing straight out of the dictionary I cannot recommend this enough. I swear the moon outside was green, but I made sure not to tell anyone I thought so.

I don’t believe Venice has an airport but then again I still don’t believe Venice is real.

B and I once drank large beers and ate stupid burgers in the airport bar in Cleveland and then we went to the souvenier store and I bought a bright blue shirt that said ‘Cleveland Rocks’ because we’d just spent a weekend at his best friend’s wedding in some impossibly remote town in Ohio and we’d had a rental car and I’d put my legs on the dashboard and all my continuing days, I was sure, would be hand-held symmetry like a stick figure drawing of a boy and a girl.

I’ve never flown out of Geneva but I’ve watched planes take off over and over from across the lake and everything in Switzerland is beauty colored by numbers, a sexless date with a painting, mountains and health and I’ve always thought I could never fall in love with anyone who really liked getting up at the same time morning which has somehow to do with how little I was compelled by Geneva.

I used to come home to San Francisco and I would know the whale-belly-blue curve of the bay, the deceptively shiny city, like a memorized label. I could recite it with my eyes closed, I could recall it half-asleep, I didn’t need to look at it to see it, and the airport was big hands and a wide face and shrugging driftwood art. You can feel there how San Francisco, for all its small town flannel shirt frame, rubs up against the far-flung remoteness of Tokyo and Bejing and Argentina. The ocean and its rapid elsewhere is present in the moving walkways as much as in the kindergarten painted Victorian homes and hilly streets and long-day-stoned light that comes down Geary street as it goes all the way to Baker Beach, seals and surfers and backseat blanket kissing.

Oakland airport is the one I left for New York when I went to college.

I keep passing through Gatwick on trains. I actually believe that Gatwick airport is a train station. I hear I’m wrong.

I once spent 9 hours in the Vegas airport after an engine failure and resultant emergency landing during a flight from LA to New York. Most everyone else went and gambled; I stayed in my seat and watched the violet, promising lights come on in the desert, shallow and flat like the bottom of an empty bowl, and I decided I was on another planet. Vegas through the giant airport window was all the boys who’ve acted like disdainful big brothers to me, it laughed a hard laugh and said I wasn’t ready for it.

Atlanta is pink and turquoise like a track suit and one time Rebecca and Matt drove me there very early in the morning and Matt wore just boxers and boots and a blanket but got out of the car and hugged me exuberantly curbside anyway, and we tried to recreate it the next time I was there but by then it was only a gesture.

Even the airport in New Orleans seems to have secrets.

Boston is my dad and I trying to rent a car in a snowstorm.

I don’t remember the one in Florida but I remember when the cab left it it went into roads like sponges and the grass was not plants at all but just lined up alligators, nighttime came slower and less demanding than it has ever been anywhere else. If I wanted no one to find me, I would have stayed. I was tempted, but I was scared I’d sink first.

I’ve been in the airport in Paris at least eleven times and the only thing I remember about it is a man with blue eyes who I saw there once when I was 19.

I wrote all of this because I couldn’t write about O’Hare. A teacher in college once told me that though you fall in love again and again and again all your life, you never quite get back what you lose when you lose first love, it is never quite like that again. O’Hare is saturated a thick paint blue, the color when kids finger paint and want to grow up to be pilots. I was there once in a lightening storm; my plane was the last one they let land, it was in the air way after the airport had been shut down for the weather. B and I had only just met, it was the third time we’d see each other, and I waited for him in a cattle-milling throng of panicked people at the baggage claim. No one was really claiming any baggage, everyone was just crisising all over the blue rubber floors, and I was very young and thought I was in a very special story. He came and found me in the same car each time, it was often cold and I was never dressed for it, and we usually fought before the car even got out past the airport parking ticket machine, but I loved him for a while like I love take-offs and landings, which I also hate, too, and I’ll inconvenience myself for a long time, probably, so that I don’t have to fly through O’Hare.