Indefinite Layovers
Sparse. Quiet. I sit upstairs at a small table in the closed café. It’s four-thirty in the afternoon and the sun is already setting into the January snow of the northern Rocky Mountains. The empty escalator buzzes like a refrigerator in the night. A weathered TSA man shuffles under the weight of a limp, gray hipster moustache. There’s the light swish of two women passing by in puffy plastic coats, one with rhinestones adorning her back jean pockets, the other a friend loyal enough to support their bargain shimmer. My sole neighbor in the café is a woman who was supposed to be in Minneapolis by now. Her metal chair cuts sharp into the concrete floor as she adjusts and calls another friend to update them on her missed flight. She’s wearing a long, tan lapel jacket, and for some reason, this is enough information for me to know she lives in the city. The coat has essence. She and the periwinkle lights running down the interior of the escalator are the only electricity that reconstructs my own metropolis days. I stare at the bulbs until they blur and I’m in the Príncipe Pío station of the Madrid Metro—I take what I can get.
In Missoula, the airport is the place where I feel most myself, even vacant and with a view I’ve been trying to extricate myself from for years. Here, I’m almost somewhere else. In town, I’m pummeled by a past most don’t know exists and certain streets quiz me about what I’ve learned since landing here. In the airport, my past empowers me and a ticket counter is a thirty-second walk away. Unless there’s a line, of course. When the café is open, the barista eagerly asks me about my travels, and he reminds me that I’m more than just someone stuck somewhere cold. As the months of my final year in Montana fall off the calendar, I remember this more often.
A small group exits the Do Not Enter doors in predictable Montana apparel: hiking boots, the aforementioned pajama bottoms, fleece camo jackets, brewery bellies, long, wiry red and brown beards, and most unfavorable, the color orange. The token guy in a t-shirt emerges—it’s -18 degrees outside—and his is an ironic white. As they make their way downstairs, the Minneapolis woman ends her call and walks to the empty security line. Two pilots and two flight attendants are the last to come out, the latter the best job I’ve ever had and the profession I sacrificed to move to Spain. They take my Spanish escalator and I am enveloped by silence.
I recently read a quote by Byron Katie: “I am a lover of what is. Not because I am a spiritual person, but because it hurts to argue with reality.” The reality is, had I not undergone what I’ve endured in Montana, I may not even be alive. I underestimated the years it would take for said survival, but via those, I learned to only move somewhere where I wouldn’t mind being stuck an unintended decade. My next potential rut: sunny, warm, ocean.
The other reason I spend time at the airport is because this is where my ambitions like to hang out. When the gates are drawn and the building doors are locked, I like to imagine them smoking cigars on the comfy couches on the third floor throwing poker chips around. They’re a tough bunch with east coast accents, always “all in,” unconcerned with my distractions and subsequent obliterations. They never give up on my goals, despite the list being under the ashtray.
Two of these goals are to work as an immigration interpreter near the Mexico/U.S. border and to write for a comedy series, both clearly related. The only place that aligns these with my rut requirements is the San Diego-Los Angeles area. At 300,000 crossings each day, Tijuana/San Diego is the most active land-border crossing on the planet, and the original name for Los Angeles was “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles Sobre el Río Porciuncula,” which is my kind of humor. The whole thing terrifies me. Yet this is how I know it’s the right decision. When I moved to Madrid, I had a panic attack the first night, but it was the best decision I’ve ever made. I follow resistance. I follow the things that nag me for years. They won’t go away otherwise. Unfortunately, this means I’ll also have to buy a house in Ibiza.
The jokes and dreams are privileges and this doesn’t go unrecognized. As my moustached TSA agent pulls a single gate across Missoula’s international border, I see that it’s not covered in razor wire. I know that if I call 911, it won’t cunningly connect me to him and a deportation to what I’ve escaped here. In a few minutes, I’ll fill my backpack with things I don’t really need, get into a car with temperature regulation, and pull a snack out of something invented solely for gloves. It will cost $3 to drive out of the parking lot, and I’ll make it to a safe home in under ten minutes. These will be paid forward by the privilege I had learning Spanish. Leaning into the fear—of letting go of what I wished had happened in Montana, of not knowing a soul where I’m headed—I join my ambitions at the ash-laden table. Not surprisingly, they’re all in again, and this time, so am I.