Airport

Departures

I remember.

June, July…
Lying on the grass, together, trying to explain the sunset-beautiful.
Our science or my religion?
Long conversations (I don’t remember if it rained), diary entries about each other, promises. A little nervousness at first. A little slow to start, then friends forever.

I remember.

Long walks to the library under golden gilded leaves, our heads in a book, our minds on some short weekend spent together. These days were special days, for you and for me. University days, learning life through our friends.

I remember.
I thought I would feel different once I’d seen you leave.
Did you leave?

I press the sunshine out my eyes and shrug off history. I realise that I haven’t been with you at all but standing in an airport for half an hour after you’ve gone, people walking occasionally around me. People who I see now are just like us.

Squeezd hands, assurances. Long looks, hug holds on memories.

The plane rises, leaves, cuts up the sun. The world’s a little darker now than ever it was before.
I watch on fondly remembering days, words, accidents. Watching the plane, and watching the space between friends gently increase.

I never said ‘Goodbye’ I said ‘God bless’ crushing into words what I hope you can see. And remember.

Remember your freen – those that make you laugh when you’re on your own, make you safe, make you happy but make you bitter, and let you hear yourself. Remember your own French, wherever they’re from. They know everything about you, so say nothing all day long.

Let them go as well, so others might feel the same. So all the lonely happy people can stop their day and look to planes. Goodbye. I don’t know who you’ll meet but I can hope they will help you like you helped me, and crush their words like I do.

My friends – who brought with them flour and sun.
Ma heroes – who tried to break nature and stay.
… This is intercession, a place beyond love’s joy. A weight so heavy it could crush you but still its only weight.

***

Terminal 1

He watches planes.

Sees them stop and leave.
He stares after uniforms and families embracing, somehow helping him prepare to say goodbye. He has seen this too many times before, too many times.

He bought a drink from a machine, spending a moment feeling the shape of coins, of British coins. He walked around but couldn’t sit, thinking of those he would soon leave behind. The lads, the friends – more so near the end. Lovers. Names he hoped would leave him on the plane. The posse and the flock.

His father – that great man whose champion’s strength he once thought lay only in his arms. That man had qualities untold but somehow friends were few and far. He was distant with everyone, and the child had often desired to grow close and solve his problems, pull the extrovert right out of him. But how would he do that now, from out so far away?

And, and, the last few minutes alone with his country. He would leave her now but still it was too soon to say that Scotland didn’t matter to him.

“I’m sorry Glasgow.” He whispered but meant. “I have walked down streets of ‘my old house’s and seen lit windows where my best friends used to live. It was a good life, I just don’t want to be ninety on those same streets, staring at those same windows, consigned to fade away.”

He had been in airports too many times to keep on coming back. Sent too many birthday cards somewhere else, phoned ahead, promised to be in the neighbourhood one day. Visited, again and again. He wanted to stop it, say goodbye and stay. So he finished his drink, adjusted his hair. He took his ticket in his hand and decided.

He walked through the gate and into the flying machine. He chewed on a mint and turned off his phone, the hardest part of leaving home.

***

Sky

He closed the shutter, fidgeted, then opened it again.
Apparently he had asked for a window seat.
There were clouds around the plane, clouds from his country, an inviting fluffed up swirl locking him out. He adjusted the time zone on his watch and tried to re-enter his phrase book, but the sky.

For a minute he thought carefully about what he could do in France, beyond retire. He would soon be too old for labour, and too inflexible for management. In Scotland he had always worked; he had been a social worker, a salesman, a banker, even started a church. He had to go to France, and knew it. Perhaps he was meant to die there. Perhaps he had in mind to die with his friends.

Stop it! He got a good grip of himself. He thought of all the times people had come to visit him, and how very lucky he had always been. Thought of all the travels he had enjoyed. Life had stamped his wrinkled passport filling every page, filling his heart. That heart he could never follow, was like some old atlas, given to you then hidden away; dusty, but still an atlas.

He thought sweetly of Glasgow.
The sunshine had never felt too far.
My France and Italy, Turkey, Bangladesh, Americas and Germany.
My Africa, my one true Australia.

He had, laterally, prayed every night for each of them, talked to God about loving them and pleaded for their-.

He remembered himself for a moment, how young he’d been when meeting his friends at first. How passionate, strong, reckless. How very, very young.
Young enough to remember, old enough to want to.

He turned the page in his phrase book and wondered how long it would be until he was pulled right back to Glasgow, and what it would take. Football, chance or disaster? It would be missing people, he decided, and fear of being a missed person himself.

In a sense he felt happy but torn. Torn from Edinburgh to Nice, Dundee to Grenoble. It was wonderful to leave but terrible to have missed his friends so much and know that he would miss those he left behind now just as much.

“C’est la vie.” He said, putting his book down. “Je dois, je peux, je veux.”

FIN