Stateless

For the next two days, I’m stateless. Each waypoint on this journey has felt like living in a tiny, isolated town.

In San Francisco, for six hours, I was a temporary citizen of the Air France LoungeTown. My world narrowed to the chair I sat in, the counter I sat at, the window I stared out of, the water dispenser I drank from, the buffet I ate from, and the bathroom I washed up in. LoungeTown was a collection of transients, with its population growing and diminishing in waves, as citizens arrived and departed. All the characters you would expect to see in a town showed up at one time or another: the grumpy old man, the boisterous town drunk, the harried young mother, the unruly child, the kind-hearted server, the leering middle-aged man. Whenever a citizen who held a role departed, another one would eventually show up and assume the role just vacated.

The next town I moved to was KAL-Flight26 Town. This town does not like wanderers. It enforces this preference using an army of identically dressed, kind-but-firm women. They all wear implements in their hair that could be transformed into weapons against a citizen uprising. With this town, my world narrowed even further. I had my own little bed, customized with whatever I packed to make my little corner bearable for 12+ hours. I had kind neighbors – one woman in particular often smiled at me, and she did yoga after sleeping. Maybe she would be my new single-serving best friend, if I hadn’t been so tired. This town does not grow and diminish in waves – it is a steady-state town with a chaotic beginning and an abrupt ending, where everyone leaves together in an anxious rush.

Sometimes, the journey between towns is exciting and energizing. I don’t recall a lot about my transit to my current town. The memory is a haze of bureaucracy, stale smells, and fluorescent lights. Now I am in KAL-DarkLounge Town. When I arrived at 5 AM, the existing citizens had already demonstrated how this town rolls: all the lounge chairs were pulled together to create replicas of the bed I had in KAL-Flight26 Town. There was one more set of chairs left in the darkest corner, so I dutifully fashioned the expected configuration – added earplugs, my alpaca wrap, and my pillow – and was able to get a few more hours of sleep. This town is drowsy and resigned. Outside of this town is a humming lounge full of exhausted people and mediocre food. I think I’ll stay in this town for a few more hours and then go explore the airport.

In my experience, the more I have worked with my mind, the easier it has become to travel long hours. But a side effect of this work is a strange sense of disconnection, as I effortlessly become a citizen in the towns along the way. I feel as if it’s been weeks since I was home.