i’m flying to DC right now to see some friends at family, and as I was leaving for the airport this afternoon I had this moment of overwhelming sadness.  i could have chalked it up to a number of things– saying goodbye to indy always makes me sad, both yo la tengo and guster are playing shows this weekend that i’ll be missing– but that’s not really it.

you know those times in your life when you’re somewhere and you feel something, and your memory of the experience isn’t from the point of view of your own eyes, but as a third-person, watching you from some impossibly picturesque angle, so that the viewpoint in your mind evokes the feeling?  it’s like the actual image in and of itself wasn’t enough to capture the feeling, so the emotion modifies/overwrites/remixes the visual.

i was a junior in college, in the international terminal of atlanta hartsfield, with a few hours to kill before i boarded a plane for zurich and then budapest.  if you’ve never been there, it feels like being in a cathedral of light and linoleum, with alcoves all along the sides with small groups of people worshipping london, rio, or hong kong.  giant flags hang down the central aisle in pairs of stained polyester.  it’s unbearably quiet and unbearably empty– far too big a place to be so quiet and so empty.

and then there’s me.  i’m walking down that central aisle with a backpack and a carry-on bag, so small and inconsequential, looking up and to the left at the flags as i walk past them, doing my best to figure out what countries they symbolize, trying any sort of trivial exercise to distract from how lonely i feel.  i’m about to die, and we always die alone.

the process of leaving your life behind always involves a death and a rebirth.  the death is painful in and of itself at the time, though it gets modulated somewhat over time by the quality of the life that follows.  when our rebirth is joyful, we don’t spend too much time thinking about how awful it felt to die; when it’s tragic, we long for the old life that we killed off so recklessly.  in this case– in my case– i had a wonderful rebirth, in this strange country where i didn’t know anyone and didn’t even speak the language.  and so i’ve never told anyone how sad and sorry for myself i felt at that moment, just before i got on the plane.  i’m sure people knew i was sad in my old life– happy people don’t leave their lives behind intentionally– but i wonder if we ever think about how sad dying-as-dying is for the person, even when the choice is their own.

ever since then, it seems, going to the airport is a sad thing for me.  i think commercial air travel is the most death-like experience we can have while we’re still alive– packed tight into a compact space with a bunch of people we don’t know, unable to move or speak or think over the dull roar of the engines, spending most of the time lost in our own thoughts or someone else’s.  it’s as if you can’t die when you’re on a plane, because you’re not really alive.

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