The following is a story about an airport:
Unsurprisingly, waking up was easier than the waking up for a school day, despite the fact I was waking up three hours earlier. Something about these morning drives were always a little surreal, possibly the overall drowsiness and, by extension, magic of the experience was the reason.
It was a twenty minute drive to the airport, my mom, dad, and I, the car was parked in some distant lot and after a series of buses all swarmed our car like hornets, we found ourselves aboard one with mainly just TSA staff where the driver asked us trivia questions, the answers of which were mostly inaccurate: “What’s the smallest national park?”
My dad, of course, said, “Gateway Arch,” which, was the right answer.
The driver claimed it was a “leprechaun and snail racing area in Portland,” which after further research, is actually just a park, not national. I put on C’est La Key’s Superflat, figuring I’d be done by the time the flight actually started.
There were a dozen citation neededs after various older TSA workers’ (accurate) answers were shut down: the first KFC was in Utah, which the driver classified as being from Corben, Kentucky.
The shuttle got to the airport and we found our way up two escalators, made our way to the baggage check. I was at about track four, the spoken word stuff started. I showed off my temps to some security guard for verification, then tried to efficiently shove the card back in my wallet and the wallet in my drawstring bag; the very act of doing this seemed to really annoy the TSA agent who was running bag inspection or whatever it’s called. I plopped my drawstring in the bucket, took off both my shoes, dropped my phone and MP3 player in, and the TSA lady hissed at me to take off my red jacket covering my black chest-pocketed t-shirt despite how I was already doing that. She then yelled at my mom passive aggressively because my mom asked if she had to take her very thin-soled flip flops off. I walked through the metal detector nervously and raised my hands above my head. None of the false metal-detector positives I’d envisioned in my imagination occurred.
It was a short trip to the flight terminal. We made it near just in time to stand in line behind a girl who seemed unable to acknowledge her mother’s existence.
We entered the plane. I sat next to two relatively normal girls who slept the whole time, tucked my drawstring under the seat in front of me, and had a hard time keeping my eyes open, staring at the K-dramas being watched on an old woman in front of me’s iPad. Half of it was its female protagonist changing into an
outfit and then stroking the male protagonist’s face, then the old lady would furiously skip the next three minutes of the show through aggressive skip five second taps, only to watch the girl change into a different outfit and stroke the guy’s face again. Lots of face stroking is the point. At that moment, the plane was about to leave. I heard, “I’m unafraaaaaid… I’m unafraaaaid… here’s where I’ll stay…” it was The Window Pt. 2.
The album was ending and on the last song I shut my eyes, not getting any sleep. I opened them when a woman with refreshments was driving a little cart around. The ginger ale cost money so I just got a water.
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