The airport is a soulless place
with nothing grand about
it, not like the great train stations built
as cathedrals of progress, in an
age where progress
meant going faster, and iron
was its language. The language of
the airport is phosphor and nylon, and
where its soul should be, a
tangle of nerves jolts in rhythm to
flights delayed.
Faster is a curse here,
though no one admits it.

I will give you this:
instead of the original
hard wooden benches of
the grand waiting room of
Grand Central (though its glory is
long dimmed), we sit in relative
comfort at Gate M16
at O’Hare Airport, where
at least there are chairs of
chrome and gray vinyl.
But relative comfort is
not comfort.
The appearance of comfort is
not comfort.

Around us at this
gray-carpeted stretch of the
airport they call a gate,
there are talking, reading and eating,
standing, sitting and fidgeting,
more than two hundred people –
mothers and fathers,
small children
and big children,
brothers and sisters,
husbands and wives,
girlfriends and boyfriends
and simply friends,
and shes and hes
and thems and theys
and none of the above –
all waiting the wait of the uneasy.

When will they let us, passports
in hand and desperately trying
not to shove though we all want to,
on the plane? wonders every last
mother, father, child, friend,
he, she, they and them.

But as I sit anxious in my chair with its
appearance of comfort,
you sit beside me calmly looking at
your phone, reading
the news in Swedish,
as if the two hundred people
around you, including me, were not
one step away from pitching a fit.

You feel me looking at you, and
you look back, an eyebrow raised,
but indulgently, and you don’t even have
to say it out loud: this race, this
battle, this barely contained riot of
two hundred passengers fighting to win
the gate and the plane and the seat, is
idiocy, and why, you ask without saying a word,
am I so desperate to get on that plane?

As your eyes –
they are a wondrous
mix of blue and brown
that turns them green, and they
have enchanted me from
the moment I first saw you –
peer into mine, I realize,
for the 1,209,408th time,
that I love you.
The comfort you give me
is neither relative nor
mere appearance, it eases
every anxious beat of my heart
at the airport, waiting to board that plane.
And I remember again how much I hate to
travel without you. There is no comfort
when you are not there.

At last the attendant
announces the number that
means we may show our credentials
and stumble into the hall they
call a jetway, you and I
waiting until the only people left are
a teenager with glittery sneakers and
a couple in what look to be their pajamas.
We slowly amble to the counter and
the waiting steward
and then on toward  the plane.

Really, I think to myself, this trip began
long before we even arrived at the airport.
We are thoroughly in the midst of it,
you and I, at the mercy of it, with
no way or reason to make it
any faster than it already is, as you
reminded me gently but assuredly
with the cocking of your eyebrow.
And having you steadfast beside me,
I admit that I actually want
every minute
of this trip
drawn out
to its very
longest
possible
second.