coming and going.

In my time, I've spent a lot of days stranded in airport lounges. There have been times I haven't minded, and times that made me question my very cursory grip on my own sanity. Right now, somewhere outside Philadelphia, I'm leaning toward the latter. Thank goodness for free wireless.

In no particular order, and in order to keep myself somehow rational as I pass the time, here are a couple of airport stories from my past.

Pearson International, October 2004.

It was Thanksgiving Monday, and I was heading back to Vancouver after my first trip home to Ontario. I was leaving behind the love of my life, again. On the redeye flight to Toronto a few days previous, the in-flight movie was Before Sunset, a sweet little love story starring my childhood fake boyfriend Ethan Hawke, and I had spent the dreamy, dazed trip looking forward to seeing my real boyfriend again, feeling so safe and so secure. When I got to the airport, practically stoned on exhaustion, there he was, at the bottom of the escalator, wearing a suit, holding up a sign that said Miss Fralick. I melted into his arms and I cried. Getting ready to say goodbye to him a few days later, I melted into him once more and cried once more and then had a breakdown when the woman at Starbucks gave me the wrong kind of tea. My parents were there with us, and my mom whispered to me to hold myself together, but I just couldn't do it. Red-faced and heaving, I said my farewells, a pattern that would become all too familiar over the next couple of years as I continued going back and forth forever. I stumbled through security and sobbed quietly until my flight was called. The in-flight movie for the trip west was The Notebook, through which I kept right on crying, both out of anger at being so emotionally manipulated by a film and utter dejectedness regarding the state of my own romantic affairs. There was a strange relief in finally getting back to my little room at Green College that night, quiet and alone and cried out at last.

Vancouver International, April 2006.

I moved home from Vancouver in a state of complete emotional insanity. I was single and ambivalently done school and still somewhat uncertain about returning to Ontario for good. All I wanted to do was disappear, and I felt like I was going about it all wrong. I packed in fits and spurts in the middle of the night and during breaks between paper writing and beach walks. Pretty well everything was labelled "Miscellaneous"--a shoe, several books and a necklace in once box, half-burnt candles and some grad school notes in another. I mailed a lot of my stuff home in advance, but that last morning, I still had four giant suitcases and a Rubbermaid container the size of a small apartment to drag up to the airport. The sun was shining and it was one of those perfect Vancouver spring mornings when it feels more like July than April, when you feel so incredibly smug and self-satisfied about your decision to go for broke in the prettiest city in the country. My Best West Coast Friend Tara and I took one last walk together down to Kits Beach and smoked one last roach on the rocks, for luck. When we got back up to our apartment, we called a taxi, I loaded up, and said goodbye.

When I got to the airport, I was mildly buzzed and wholly out of it. I had to stand in a special lineup because of all my extra bags, and there was a dog behind me. I convinced myself I was about to be arrested, but instead, the wonderful people at WestJet cut me a deal on my extra baggage fees. Things are looking up, I thought to myself.

So I sat and sat in the departures lounge, daydreaming, till out of nowhere, a WestJet staffer ran up to me and said, "Oh, it's you!"

"Excuse me?" I replied, convinced my days of freedom were numbered. I must have done something wrong, I thought. They must have found pot in my luggage. In my head I started writing the Hamilton Spectator article about the incident: Local High Achiever Gets High on Something Else, Lets Entire Community Down.

"I recognized you from your pictures!" he cried. He looked like he had just won the lottery.

This was getting weirder and weirder. Luckily, he noticed how freaked out I was, and quickly explained: When one of my mammoth suitcases was getting loaded onto the rack, the bag tag had somehow gotten torn off. It ended up on an arrivals carousel, where apparently it just spun around and around in circles for ages, all alone (somehow fitting, I thought). This guy had finally retrieved it and brought it back up to departures, hoping to reunite it with its owner, and in an attempt to figure out who it belonged to, he opened it up. Lucky for him, it was filled, at least partially, with photo albums and yearbooks ( I am not one for travelling light).

"So I just looked through and tried to pick out some of the faces that were in most of the pictures," he said, "and hoped I'd see one of them up here." He paused, and squinted, looking at me with sudden scrutiny. "Did you dye your hair?"

Oh, I thought, this is a sign.