Ten Hours at the Airport
with gratitude for a line from Hawk McCrary

Your heart sinks when you see the message –
delayed, again, after one flight had already
been cancelled. But there was nothing you
could do, so you tuck your bag over your
shoulder and trudge through the long alleys.
You find a small bookstore and sit
on the corner of the floor for an hour,
reading a book on ADD and cleaning.
You walk to your gate, unpack your lunch,
eat the cold chicken and yams. When the flight’s
delayed for the third time, you rise to stand
in the snaking line with the others, all those
with somewhere important to go.
The young woman in front of you
clutches her group of paper boarding passes:
Cleveland to Atlanta, Atlanta to Amsterdam,
Amsterdam to Riyadh. Her ill mother waits
for her at the hospital. You catch her wide eyes,
help her talk to the gate agent, stay with her
until her problem is solved. You trade numbers
as a manager brings out bags of food, lays them
out on a table and tells the crowd to help themselves.
Other passengers are huddled together on the chairs,
telling each other stories about their time in the
other’s hometown as they eat the chicken sandwiches.
A grandmother, dressed in her good skirt and shoes,
naps with her head leaned back against the wall.
Strangers before, you’re bonded by your changed plans,
your many hours together. As the day turns to night,
a woman seethes into her phone, demanding a hotel room.
A gate agent calls an angry man darling then retreats,
apologizing, as he bristles – don’t call me darling.
Your new friend, newer to English, whispers to you,
Is darling a bad word? You reassure her it isn’t,
a term of endearment that to this man, wasn’t endearing.
You know the stakes are low for you –
your days of flying with small children are over.
You have room, this day, to be late. You have
your lunch and a book. But in the crowd, you see
every possible response to thwarted plans. Any of them
could be you, or have been, once. When the pilot announces
there’s a slim chance the flight might make it out tonight,
the group lets out a cheer. Hours later, you board in triumph,
your gratitude made deeper by your waiting. You give
the gate agents a standing ovation and they blush,
all smile and shine. At home, your family makes a joke
about how you’ve been in airport hell. A friend corrects them.
No, it’s been airport heaven.

*

Karly Randolph Pitman is a writer, teacher, facilitator and mental health trainer who brings understanding to sugar addiction, overeating and other ways we care for trauma. You can find her poetry at O Nobly Born, a reader supported newsletter, and her healing work with food at her substack, When Food is Your Mother. She lives in Austin, Texas where she does as much as possible with her hands and is writing a book on bringing compassion to food suffering.