In a Minute There is Time

 By Molly Ketcheson

I.               Heathrow Airport, London, England

Airports had always been holy to Thea. A liminal space between time and quiet. A place where coming and going meant the same thing. Where forward meant more than backward. Where future and past circled and circled until you were everywhere, all at once. Thea loved that feeling. That she was everywhere all at once. Arriving and Departing.

Now, sitting in a cracked leather chair at her gate in Heathrow Airport, leaving a city she knew she would return to, because life was circular like that, going to a city she had missed like you miss mid-summer on winter’s coldest day, Thea thought about how her life had been shaped by airports.  Maybe she had always been meant for this place, for the coming and the going.

II.              Simón Bolívar International Airport, Caracas, Venezuela

When Thea was not yet Thea but rather a four-month-old hope in her mother’s womb, her parents had arrived at Simón Bolívar International Airport, with enough money for two plane tickets. Their hearts wavered with every step they took through the airport, as they bought two tickets to Toronto, as they got coffee from a small stand by the gate, as they walked out towards their plane. Neither of them had ever been outside Venezuela before. But neither of them had expected to spend their lives there. They had first fallen in love because they both secretly wished to go, and go, and go. Life seemed to be something worth chasing.

So, they had saved, and planned a little but not enough, and found themselves in the airport that day, hearts wavering but eyes looking ahead, hands clasped and feet ready to run.

Their plane was delayed nearly two hours. In that time, Thea’s mother paced the floor to give her feet something to do, and her father read a mystery novel whose ending he had figured out on the seventeenth page. He had always been good at that, knowing the answer before a question had been asked. Both of them were thinking about beginnings, about how cold Toronto would be and how they had not packed warm enough jackets. Both of them were thinking about endings, about how warm Caracas would be and how they had not packed enough sunlight. For those two hours, both of them were thinking about beginnings and endings and how those two things were contingent on each other to survive. The airport’s dim lighting as the sun set outside the windows seemed to agree with them, that the setting of the sun was its rise somewhere else.

They eventually made it on the plane, which eventually made it in the sky. They looked out the window and saw Simón Bolívar International Airport one last time before their plane lifted above the clouds. It was the last glimpse of Venezuela either would have for many years.

They arrived in Toronto on a late autumn day much colder than they had feared, but the cold felt welcoming, somehow. Inviting them into something new. Thea was born five months later, in the midst of spring, in a city that would be the beginning and ending of all her stories.

III.            Côte d’Azur Airport, Nice, France

Eighteen-year-old Thea had won a national essay contest, and the money was supposed to go directly into her university tuition fund.

Instead, eighteen-year-old Thea had gone to France.

It had seemed like the right decision at the time, and Thea’s parents, who still saw life as something worth chasing, gave their daughter their blessing to do the completely un-sensible thing and blow her scholarship money on a trip across the ocean. Besides, she had been taking French in school for years, and this was a perfect chance to further her education in the subject.

She arrived, having not slept in approximately eight hours because she had spent those eight hours chatting with her seatmate, a French boy who had been visiting his grandparents in Montreal. He was tall, and had blonde hair like a hurricane. He was funny in a way that was not mean, and thoughtful in a way that was not condescending. Thea liked him, and she did not like many people.

While Thea was waiting for her bags, the boy came up to her with a piece of paper in his hand. On it was an email address. His, she pieced together as he stumbled through his words.

She would marry him one day. Not that she knew it at the time. No, they would not even date until he surprised her at the arrivals gate of a different airport two years later. But at the Côte d’Azur Airport, their worlds arrived at each other, and her life changed. It had been the unreal magic of the airport that had brought them together. Amongst the coming and going, the beginnings and endings, they had found each other.

IV.            Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport, Sydney, Australia

Thea had a notebook in her lap, but she was not writing anything down. At the small table in the small café in the corner of the departures terminal at Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport, Thea was staring out the window into the deep of the night, punctured only by the occasional pulse of light from the planes. She had been all around Australia for the past two weeks, supposedly writing an article for the National Geographic. If only she could figure out what the article was about. If only she had any feelings about Australia other than that it was here, and it was breathtaking, and full of places to go.

Her editor had told her she needed to start writing something more specific, more present than her usual tales that stopped in one place for a moment before picking up and moving on. They don’t hold weight, he told her. There is nothing keeping you here.

There was nothing keeping her anywhere. There was home, where her French boy waited in an apartment on a busy street, but there was nothing keeping her anywhere else. As she waited to board a flight out of Australia, there was no wistful urge to stay. She had seen what she could, and was sure she had missed much, but she was ready to chase the future.

The only place she really wanted to stay was here, in this airport. Where time slowed and what had passed was worth it. What had passed was as beautiful as what would come next, because they danced together. Waltzed through her, all that had been and all that would be. Possibilities spreading out for ages and she just a moment in the middle of them all, at the mercy of chance once more. She could be the universe or she could be nothing, because right now, in this airport, she was everywhere.

Simón Bolívar International Airport, Caracas, Venezuela.

She wrote in down on the notepad. Wrote a list of the airports where she had been, the ones that had been carved into her skin. Last on the list was Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport, the place where she had decided where she would go next, what she would chase. How she would finally put her heart into the world: a book. She would write a book about airports, a love letter to the places that had taken her to and from, had made her life something she wanted to chase. A love letter to the person she had been, and the person she would be, and the urge to stay in between those two Theas, the necessity to eventually get on the plane.

In the Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport, Thea believed in the future once more. Because she could feel it, as surely as she could feel the past. Because she had a place to go, as well as one to leave. The dim airport lights echoed her thoughts, the conviction in her gut, just as they had for her parents all those years ago. Airports really were everything, all at once.

V.             Pearson International Airport, Toronto, Canada

Waiting for her, her book under his arm, a smile in his eyes, was her French boy, beyond him, out the windows, her city, and yes, this really was a holy place.

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