being in an airport makes you selfish
Chidima Anekwe
i. being in an airport makes you selfish. an announcement on the intercom about a flight cancellation makes your stomach constrict before you realize, thank goodness, it’s for some other plane—not your own. too bad for the people on that flight. there’s probably an absent father rushing to make it to his daughter’s wedding, hoping to patch up their relationship once and for all by walking her down the aisle. or maybe some guy in the military who’s just received word his pregnant wife has gone into labor, so now he’s gone awol to make it to the birth of his child. but too bad for the absent father and the awol father-to-be. you have to make it to paris for dorm move-in day before people start to bond and make friends without you. you plug in your earbuds and listen to the amélie soundtrack and try to tune out the ensuing chaos over the canceled flight.
ii. you’re sitting at the gate and are very unhappy to see that some people do believe in a class-based society and have decided to wait for boarding in those gold member lounges, instead. you watch a middle-aged couple enter and picture them sticking their tongues out at you and shouting “sucks to suck!” before closing the door behind them. you lament being perpetually stuck in economy with the big noisy families and their crying babies and rowdy kids kicking the backs of seats. you look around at your people and think oh!—we’re the plebeians here, aren’t we? but then you remember how your own family never had the money to fly anywhere growing up. now you fear you’ve become quite the spoiled brat, and feel guilty for having thought yourself a plebeian for having to board in zone 4 on a delta flight to france.
iii. there is a boy at the airport, waiting at the same gate as you. he’s not unattractive and he seems to be about your age, so now you’ve fallen desperately in love with him and worry you might die without him. he looks at you once, or at least in your general direction, so you’re confident he feels the same way. you try to scan his bags for any sign of college apparel, in part to confirm his age, in part to better plan for your imaginary future together. you’re not sure you could do long distance.
iv. when you board, you say hello to the flight attendants extra sweetly so that they will pick you as their favorite, or at least decide that they certainly like you better than all the other boarding passengers who didn’t say hello at all, or maybe did, but not as sweetly as you did. you’ve also fallen in love with all the flight attendants, it seems, and you wonder what it is that makes them so appealing. aren’t there weird hiring practices with airlines where they only take on conventionally attractive people to be flight attendants? you’re sure you saw that online once. and why are men never flight attendants? it must be some gross sexist thing about the service aspect of the job. you hope that isn’t part of what makes them appealing. you remember that one central cee song and how he says fucking a flight attendant is something he must do before he dies. you listen to it until it’s time to turn on airplane mode.
v. you hear the pilot’s announcement and wonder if he’s nervous. and if all pilots get nervous, or if maybe you should be nervous if you have a nervous pilot. you wonder if he plans on sticking around afterwards to see a bit of paris, or if he has to turn right back around to new york for another flight. how does that work? when does he get to see his family? you’ve only ever known one pilot before, he ran an organization you volunteered for back in high school. but he was somehow always around. now you wonder if he was lying about being a pilot all this time. maybe he’d only taken a couple flying classes and trusted none of you would care to look him up on linkedin. you refuse to pay extra for in-flight wifi, so you can’t check until you land. by then you will have forgotten…
Chidima Anekwe is a senior at Yale University.
ABOUT THE ART | Sterling Cloister Teraptych by Alina Susani, 2023. Alina Susani is a student at Yale University.
