L'Aeroporte, Day II

A day of what could be stress, and has instead been mostly enjoyable. Being in hotels is strange, since I worked in Glacier. I feel a responsibility to do things a certain way because I know what is easy or hard or irritating or amusing for staff. I felt bad for checking out at noon because I knew it meant my housekeeper would have to consciously organize her route through her rooms that much more. I was careful not to muss the extra bed and to strip the one I slept in and make a separate pile for the towels I used in case they do them separately. I left a tip even though I only stayed for one night, and a note about how prettily the towels were folded. Some of this is probably a little ridiculous, but there you have it. Housekeeper empathy.

I was maybe going to go into Chicago because I have so much time, but I decided to roam O’Hare instead. The flaneur in me swells in airports. I like to be alone. I like to be in the midst of big incongruous swarms of people. I like the particular sort of acting that being in an airport invites, at least for me – the opportunity to invent a new self entirely out of mannerisms and visual cues, who you make eye contact with and how quickly you look away, how you thank the people who give you your bottled water or direct you to the nearest outlet, how you say excuse me, if you bump into people, how quickly you walk, how much you let what is happening in your headphones intrude on what is happening in other people’s ranges of hearing. These are welcome opportunities.

All I’ve ever wanted, really, is to be perceived as competent – in a weary way or a graceful way, because I have to be or because it is my nature to put others at ease – really any of these ways would do. Airports are so interesting to me because there are so many stories to be invented in them. Are you coming or going. What is a woman with ugly sweatpants like that going to do in Buenos Aires. What is a woman with a shock of pink hair like that going to do in Grand Rapids. Examining the leans and sighs and sips of water, the way of shuffling through the bag, of the people around me drives me to play this game. If I am sitting here trying to figure everyone else out, someone else must be watching me as curiously, and so we will give them a show – hold the books in one hand and the water crooked under the arm while walking, sit down in one fell swoop, cross legs. Look up and around as if the wing of the nearby plane is very interesting, once in a while. Make a ponytail without adjusting. Pretend to text message. Smile slightly from time to time as the pages of the book are turned. Curl legs underneath to show comfort with surroundings. When walking, move fast and touch shoulder strap frequently. Wend in a way that implies urgency, duck and weave. Do not say excuse me. Two days straight of airport routine have brought some new additions to the playbook. Sit on the floor even if there are seats available. When getting up to look at the monitor, leave the bag behind but take the wallet and the ipod and the passport. After ten pm, meander instead of booking it. When buying a book, take time paging through the wallet for the right change, evaluating both bills and cards.

The nice thing about these impressions is that they won’t ever lead anywhere. They’re just leaving little fingerprints on the consciousnesses of the multitudes, really. Everyone is curious in an airport, but no one is sizing anything up that will travel with them all the way to their destination, maybe not even onto the airplane. I haven’t been gathering what sort of fingerprints I am leaving, and that’s ok. That’s part of the fun of it, really. This is the same game I played as a little girl in the bookstore, wrapping myself around my father’s legs whenever he was talking to someone graying and handsome about something academic. It is the same game I slip into at bigger parties, moving often from room to room, sipping from my cup long after it is empty and holding it just so, winding my way to the back porch to be with the smokers, even though I am not a smoker. It’s the reason I walk fast and with head down on paths at school, and why I don’t cross at the light even when I need to cross both Grand and Snelling.

I wonder if everyone does this, or some version of it? When I first started, when I was very small, it was because I wanted to create visual scenes that would make good photos or stand out as seemingly random ambient memories. Later, because I wanted to create cinema, to move like Audrey Hepburn, and perhaps to someday rope in a man like William Holden with nothing but my way of reading and gripping a cup, and when he struck up a conversation, my aloofness and naivete. I don’t so much have a goal anymore. It’s just habit when I’m in the middle of a crowd, or when I’m in a place that doesn’t belong to me. I am trying to create someone who can claim the train platform, the concourse, with either her fierce traveler’s alacrity or the tired sense of having been in this spot many times before.

To simultaneously claim and have no basis for claim is a beautiful thing. I am drawn, visually, to the people who practice it. I like to think that other people are doing this too, contemplating each other’s jeans and assured ways of brushing hair out of their eyes, wondering if they are going home or visiting a friend and what it means that you are calm even though it is late, and everyone is missing their connecting flights. I like especially when I catch strangers contemplating each other. There are people who you have the urge to grab and hold so that the freneticism will leach out of them and people who make you feel tranquil, just by looking at them.

Despite the fact that I play this game, despite the fact that it is by nature a series of calculations, the calm I’ve found as I’ve settled more into myself and life and the Cities means that it’s a lot less panicky and driven than it used to be. The hyperlens I direct at other people and the hyperlens I direct at myself through other people’s eyes has subsided some, which is not to say it’s subsided to a respectable level. Right the very second the lens is turned on self as accounter of self, for example. The questions are shooting everywhere. Am I the sort of person who can ramble and introspect and people like to read it because they recognize bits of themselves in it? Am I the sort of person who rambles and introspects and people think “wow, how self absorbed?” Am I the sort of person who can ramble and introspect and people think I am crazy?

Tangentially, I bought a few books to read including “How We Are Hungry,” (even though I have already been through it) because it contains “The Only Meaning Of the Oil-Wet Water,” which is a story that has been stuck to the inside of my brain since I first read it in the summer, because it mashes together details and introspectiveness in ways that resonate with my tendency for hyperobservation. I would categorize Dave Eggers as someone who can ramble and introspect and people scream “yes!” internally because they know that he is also talking about them, and they didn’t know their condition could be captured with such gorgeous language. Dave Eggers should write poems, maybe. Maybe he does and I just don’t know it.

People have been calling me “sweetie,” which is really the only read I have on how I come off in these situations. It irks me a little, because it implies that I don’t seem competent, which is what I strive for. I have been trying less, though, to seem like an expert, and doing more moving in ways that are fluid and comfortable and weary because that is how it is economical to move. That I am not so concerned with projecting finesse perhaps means that I am perceived as more comfortable, and perhaps as more like what I am – which is young and small, hesitant, polite, slightly unsure. Apparently, the sort of person that other people are driven to offer some comfort with language. Last night a harried gate agent was doling out “my dears,” which were nice. I personally like “baby” and its derivatives, but I give that to people I have some sort of affection for, whether it be fleetingly established or built over years. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt like using endearments with a stranger, to ease their emotional or logistical load. Enough. Dublin in t-minus 12 hours, if I am not unlucky.