At the gate

I cross and uncross my legs. One foot is numb. In front of where I’m seated on a hard plastic curved chair, two friends in matching yellow hoodies sit in comfortable silence, glued to their phones and AirPods. 

It’s 11.27 pm in a Sunday night. I’m sitting on a bolted down chair outside my boarding gate, waiting for my flight to Osaka. It’s so late that they’ve turned off the air conditioning I got here two hours too early and somehow missed the premium lounge on the way in and now I’m stuck here waiting for the airport staff to actually open the gate. My butt has gone numb now too. 

My glasses hurt the bridge of my nose and I slip them off. Without them, looking down the vast hallway of the airport. I realise how much my myopia had returned; the gate signs are blurry.  

The seconds slink by. It was midnight and there was nobody on my phone to reply if I texted. My kindle was tucked in my bag but I had just started a new book and it had not yet begun to pull me in.  For the first time in a long time, I had nothing to do. No email to respond to, no videos to edit, no games in my iPad to play. Nobody to speak to, no child to watch for, no funny questions to field. 

Large insect wings fluttered in my chest. My throat seemed to seize as the extrovert in me contemplated the days ahead where I would sleep alone, eat alone, and figure out the train system by myself. The mother in me grappled with the feeling that I had left my family at the wrong time, when the children were off school and my rightful place belonged there next to them. The wife in me fretted what if the next anxiety attack happened in the week I was gone. 

I understood then that I was deeply uncomfortable with having nothing to do. Was it the twenty first century over reliance on devices to vanish boredom that we had all grown used to? Was it the ADHD? Was it a fear that I nurtured deep inside to be unneeded, unnecessary? Was it all of these or none at all?

The barrier opens. The sound system blares overhead. I stand up, shift my bag strap to my shoulder, unsnap the telescope of my carry on suitcases handle and yank. I take my first steps towards the airport lounge barrier, towards my first days of solitude in years where every decision will be mine and mine solely and I will live for a little while without role.