Flight Date: October 17th

In a step that feels irreversible, I have purchased a plane ticket.  That is to say, my wife purchased a plane ticket for me as if she were my technologically savvy secretary - which she is.  I shall depart these shores on October the 17th, to return on All Hallows' Eve.

Traveling alone is a particular sort of fasting, one which I tend toward much more enthusiastically than anything involving a lack of food.  Three years ago, when my summer was marked by hiccups of domestic deprivation, my wife was greatly with child - our first - and I jaunted to both Scotland and Hawaii like a bee on a string.  It would not be fair to say I didn't enjoy it, but it was my first real glimpse of the inescapable heart-stretching that comes of pulling away from roots - a blessing I didn't know I had been given.  It could only have been made complete if I had taken Kat with me, but alas.

I kissed her goodbye on the ramp up to the gates at McGhee-Tyson Airport, my last treasured glimpse of color - hazel green and hopeful pink in a halo of brunette - before I entered the grey sensory deprivation of air travel.  Beyond the Rubicon of the metal detector, I walked upon apathetic carpet; its patterns stretched blase geometry from wall to wall, their only function to disguise dirt and lint until some diligent soul with a vacuum could suck it up.  What drywall there was stared back with a uniform sigh, brooking no history to trespass upon its quieting hue.  Pants-suited modernity gobbled up errant snatches of architecture, denying the lone traveler the visual pleasures of, say, a train station.  Mostly, there were windows, great endless portals of glass that let sharply cut sunlight through to illuminate the grey.  I spoke little, of course.  Most lone travelers speak little in an airport.  They talk to security and staff, working out their issues and offering only the most timidly chaste blandishments as conversation.  Jokes are not allowed.  Much of your behavior therein is based on security and safety, no laughing matter either one.  Airport security work must either be the most depressing job or the one most nearly akin to sitting in the back row of a church sanctuary, trying with moderate success to dam up your laughter at the pastor's galavanting jowels.

Airports are seen as great opportunities for architects, but many of those I have experienced - the open-air verandas of Honolulu aside - are largely homogenous.  You are given views of the tarmac, the gates, the sundry fast-food and newsstand diversions, and, in small doses of hopeful reminder, the sky.  You sit.  You wait.  You give your time to pilfered newspapers and borrowed magazines, and you people-watch, but mostly your mind is increasingly abuzz with the numbness of waiting.  You think about the odd minutiae of life.  Who was the first person to put aglets on shoelaces?  Where did people suddenly gain the courage to eat tomatoes, which are part of the nightshade family?  Do jellyfish sleep?  It is at this point that you awaken from your stupor to the realization that you've been staring unblinkingly at an older woman for the last fifteen minutes.  She does not look pleased.  You bury your face in Newsweek.

I have found wonderful snatches of odd conversation in airports and on planes, but these are mere rents in the veil of isolation that descends upon me when I travel alone.  Some seat-mates are glad to talk to another human being in that sea of strangers, but some give out the terse answers and sterile smiles that unmistakably say, "Leave me alone."  Some fake sleep.  I have moments of existential semi-clarity in which I say things to myself like, "I am sealed up in a self-sufficient tin can at 35,000 feet with two hundred people I don't know."  The weightier implications of this begin to feel like rocks on my chest.  I long for more coffee, or for any self-medication, really.  Anything to break the oppressive feedback loop of being forced to live with myself alone.  I've heard of park rangers coming upon groups of campers to sit near them in mostly unbroken silence, just listening to conversation; there are stories of officers pulling people over just to see a human face up close for a moment or two.  When we are forced into the dark, we will take what light we can get.

After I have endured this fast for more than eight hours, it becomes unnerving.  After twenty or so, it approaches the limits of my forbearance.  It is in this harrowing mental state, however, that, after enduring the final trial by customs with their cosmological questions ("Why have you come to the United Kingdom?"), I emerge to discover the un-recycled air on the other side, being breathed in and out by my coyly grinning friends, who are waiting for me just beyond the gate.