in between

Photo by Steph

It started with Dutch boys in wooden shoes: Kreta 2005. What could be cuter? The girls were tall and thin. Overdressed, most of them. Their buses were waiting. I was sitting on a bench (next to a German at first and then a cop), in teacher clothes, writing sad but expectant thoughts in my little book. I was waiting for someone, who was not on any one of those multiple flights from Stuttgart or Amsterdam or Brussels.

I walked in and out. A guy kept trying to give me a brochure for Aqua Splash, or whatever it’s called. How would he know? My teacher clothes may have meant something else to him, or nothing at all.

Airports are great equalizers. Rich or poor, coming or going, everyone has to stand in line, to carry bulky baggage, to share spaces and words and breath, to remain on one side of the glass or the other. To expect delays. To be neither here nor there.

Only in a place like that could I have met Marcello. Or the person I was waiting for, for that matter, προχθές. I watched the clock in agony, but the plane arrived on time. Sometimes everything goes like clockwork, with or without delay.