At 9 PM, I start crying in the airport. Ostensibly, I am an adult, and should not cry in the airport. But I have to get to LA by morning and the plane to Dallas needs emergency maintenance, which could take until who knows when. We should’ve left at 7:10 and I have missed every connecting flight to LAX. The man at the front desk looks harried. A man in a camouflage jacket has a meeting he has to make. They have booked me a hotel in Dallas for my layover. I have never been to Dallas. People are looking at me.
I have done everything right. I emailed all my professors about missing Thursday and Friday classes, I took my car straight from my last class, I parked in the lot furthest from the airport. “This is important,” I told them, “my younger brother needs me.” My mom needs me to drive on the highways, because she can’t. My family, incomplete without a father, is even more pathetically barren with just my mom and brother. I need to get to LA. I need to follow my plan. This is the story I tell myself. I have a plan, and the world will follow it.
Some well-intentioned men waiting for the flight to Texas try to advise me about switching my flights. They call me honey. They have wide eyes and I try to make them uncomfortable by telling that that I’m my brother’s “only family.” I use this to justify my crying; I use it to remind them that I am responsible and have seen hardship. I have already switched my flights, and their advice is useless and repetitive. I hate them because they are not my father. I try not to feel insulted. I pretend that they think I’m maybe fifteen, despite my Kenyon College water bottle and older appearance. I console myself that if they imagine I’m younger, their projection of my incompetence is justified and I don’t have to think about sexism or my anger. Through ballet summer programs, moving around so much, and audition seasons, I have probably flown more than these businessmen. But I nod at their advice.
Two more hours pass.
“You have done everything right,” my boyfriend reminds me on the phone. At 10 PM, we begin to board the plane. Our arrival in Dallas is scheduled for midnight. I sit next to a man who tells me he works for a diaper company. He is from Waco, but was born in Mexico. He has only flown twice in his life. I tell him about how I used to black out while flying. He laughs. I leave out that it was from panic attacks.
My whole life, I have been told a story about myself. The story is that if I work hard enough, there are no other factors that affect my outcome. If I work to get into college, I will get into college and go. If I want something, I can buy it. If I need something, it will come. Sadly, success has made me live in this fantasy world for too long. If I want to get to LA by 9:20 on a Wednesday, then that plane will take off. If I believe that I need to make up for my father’s death by being the perfect sister and daughter, I can live within that fantasy, even though my brother has grown up now and I abandoned him at home when I went to boarding school six years ago.
I am competent. I am efficient. I make my own money; I drive my own car; I negotiate rental agreements. I argue with mechanics and customer service representatives. I cut my own hair; I buy and cook my own groceries; I complain endlessly about how college doesn’t prepare everyone else for the real world, a world that came all too soon for me. I have allowed hardship to harden me, to make me proud and anxious. And yet I cannot fix a plane. But this new plane that they have pulled out of some other terminal, it does take off.
When we hit turbulence, I imagine us nosediving deep into the ocean. I imagine myself dying deep within the ocean, water as black as the sky. We are flying over Indiana, far from the sea. I pray that I will fall asleep. Storms fall over the Midwest tonight, the captain tells us. It’s going to be a bumpy ride for a while. I am on a plane, I tell myself. I am breathing, in and out. I fall asleep with my head propped on the plastic of the seat in front of me.
Again and again, God is teaching me to let go. My brother will have other birthdays. When we land, I get a text of his birthday dinner. He looks happy, an emotion I don’t have anything to do with. I feel a strange sense of relief. My family, even without a father, can keep going without my constant supervision. The truth is, I have no control over my own life. No one does. I pray about this, but I mostly pray that God will give me the things I want when I want them.
At midnight, we land, and the complementary shuttle comes an hour later. Someone’s mom pays for my cab. She says her daughter looked at Kenyon. We wave goodbye at the counter, and I somehow feel better about her charity than the Texan men’s advice. Maybe because she spent the whole cab ride on her computer, working. Maybe because I could tell that she, like me, is proud of her self-sufficiency, and helping someone else made her happy. Maybe because she actually gave me something more than unsolicited advice.
Alone in a cavernous, freezing, posh, complementary room in Texas, I think of the movie Taken and sex traffickers. I imagine my own roundhouse kick. I imagine the self-defense my boyfriend taught me. I am in a hotel, I remind myself. The door is locked. I am breathing, in and out. I fall asleep.
A few hours later, I board the next plane and think of my father, and how he used to sing the Billie Holiday line “God bless the child who’s got his own” about me as a little girl. It’s strange to think that many of the things he would have been proud of came as a product of his death: my self-sufficiency, my guts, my derision for overbearing Texan men in airports. But the truth is, I don’t have my own. I do what I can, and pray about the rest. My family loves me, but they don’t need my supervision. All I know is that I am breathing, in and out. I am loved. I am enough.
Image Credit: Marguerite Serkin