The Writer on a Plane

Note: The following post was actually written on Sunday, on board a flight across country. This came in the Boston to Detroit leg. (Detroit sucks.)

The city of Boston: it’s f-ing cold. Please, why, more than 150 years after Americans began settling places like the Southwest, more than 250 years after we settled the Southeast, hell, even after we’ve settled the Pacific Northwest, why do people still choose to live in such cold-ass places?

Is the cold a metaphor for my two recent trips to the Bay state? Hell, no. It’s just friggin’ cold. Seriously. Really cold.

I am writing this on the plane home from Boston. It’s been a harrowing day which peaked with a dash through the B terminal of Logan International Airport. It was a day of significant milestones. Some I’ll share, one or two I’ll take to my grave.

I’ve never come close to missing a flight. Since my first trip aboard Eastern Airlines in 1984, a two-hour flight to Orlando when I was 5 years old, I’ve never missed a flight. Three weeks ago, I thought I was going to… intentionally.

I had traveled to Bean town to visit my best friend living in Cambridge and a fine gentleman my friend Ron introduced to me some time ago. In the weeks prior, I’d begun talking much more frequently with said gentleman, and I’d begun really looking forward to the conversations. It is a nightmarishly imperfect situation. Two people separated by distance, by uncertainty, and by cautious routine. For once, I did something truly impractical and boarded a plane, flew 3,000 miles, and spent a long weekend with a person I was just getting to know.

Three weeks later, I was doing it again. And today, four days after my arrival, it was time to end it again. These trips are like little relationships in that I have no idea what the future will bring. This is most likely my last trip to Boston – his school year (graduate school, not junior high) is coming to an end and the next few months on my part are unmanageable – and I don’t know today when I’ll see him again.

I’ve never missed a flight, until these trips to Boston. Three weeks ago, I came ridiculously close to purposefully missing my flight and extending my trip. Reason won out and I got on the plane and was home in time to get a full night’s sleep before returning to work. On this trip, I think fate played a role.

The connection between subway to bus that would take me to Logan resulted in nearly a 45 minute delay. I arrived at the ticket counter with just 20 minutes until the door to the plane would close. Like when in the most special moments of time, these moments lingered, time passing slowly. Huffing in the security check point line. “Of course I have no liquids, I know the rules. I’ve done this before.” It seemed few others in the line had done it before. A final, untied-shoe race through the terminal to, naturally, the last gate in the seemingly unending hall.

If I missed the plane, I’d have another 20 scarce hours with this person. During that minute or so run through a thin airport crowd, I had considered taking a turn and a 10 minute pit stop in the restroom at least 4 times. What would be the consequences?

That will have to wait for another trip. I don’t know how many more “good-byes” I have in me, but I will keep making the trips until I am completely tapped, or until I don’t have a host anymore.

Note: Detroit still sucks.