Phoenix airport induced nostalgia

 11/23/23 

It's thanksgiving, it's a Thursday. I'm in the bedroom in my grandma's house that she's lived in since 1969 and that I've slept in countless times since 2002. My twin bed (it's not mine but I like to pretend) used to feel spacious and now my feet hang over the edge (I don't mind).

My grandma's house

As I stepped off the plane, I was absorbed into the micro climate that is the Phoenix airport. Stale and sweet, soft and sweaty, an infinity loop of air conditioner circulated breeze. It was so familiar, like slipping into a shirt you once adored and somehow it still fits.

I walked brainlessly, knees popping and muscles crackling, not looking at signs but letting myself fall into the current composed of other travelers, their bags, their children, their dogs in those carry on cages. My feet, now homing pigeons, directions embedded in their dna, guiding me down never ending halls, so straight and long and lined by rows of rectangular windows tinted to ward off the desert sun. The walkways mimic the highways in Arizona, built noble, wide and never ending, their walls converge in the impossible distance and disappear into pin pricks, a trick of the eye I learned in a drawing art class once, armed with a pencil and a ruler and empowered to create an airport terminal or never ending road. 

One robotic step in front of the next, looking out at the red brown mountains past the taxiing planes, all sharp edges and crevices, pushing up and out against flat, wide, beautiful blue dry sky. Wispy white clouds stretched across the two dimensional blue expanse like sheeps wool passed through the detangling brush enough times to start making sense of the knots but not enough that the fibers have let go of one another completely. 

Beloved orange tree, partially withered from
record breaking heat last summer 

Though I haven't been here in years, my memories were flooding back and collaging, overlaying atop one another and pulling me from the past to the present and back again. When I was on the train to the airport in Portland, I let my eyes fall into a hundred yard stare, glazing over, my vision sliding across the trees, houses, cars that we passed. If I pulled my focus back, I could look at my own reflection in the window. Relaxing again, eyes on the passing scene. Back and forth I went, using my eyes and neighboring facial muscles like the zoom and focus settings of a camera, weaving my two visions together. 

Walking onwards still, I pass by the benches my club swim team once sat on together, in matching outfits and exhausted from a weekend of competing, bags and backs pushed to the wall so we would take up as little space as possible at the outshoot of the TSA line. I wonder where my former teammates are now, I remember some of their names and next to nothing about where they ended up going after graduating from high school. My eyes and memories unfocus again as I trod, now I'm 5 years old and looking around at everyone taking their shoes off and computers out of their bags, marveling aloud at how cool it is that we all went for the same length of vacation, and how we're all going home on the same day too. The kind of little kid statement that makes my mom look down quizzically, not sure how to answer because of how ungrounded from reality my perception of reality actually is. I focus my eyes again, I know now that everyone here around me is coming and going to unique places, but I still think we are connected, are we are not bound together by any invisible strings? The idea is too much to bear.

My throat aches, my memories threaten to make my eyes spill over. I'm weaving through people standing and waiting for their traveler to come around the corner, to be reunited with them. Their blank eyes glide over me, searching for someone else, no one is here for me today. My grandma once waited for us here, standing still with hands clasped and her usual soft smile, a balloon for me and my sister in tow. We would rush to her, tumble into her arms. "Hello my dears" she would say, giving us our balloon strings, leading us to her car in the parking structure that's shaped like a giant spiral. Counting circles on our way down, we'd drive out into the bright hot light of the Arizona sun, dusty red rocks and hills stretching around us, welcoming us back to the land of mauve and beige and cactus.

This time, I force my eyes back to the present, and head to the pick up area, an adult all alone. I wait for half an hour, watching in on little glimpses of people's lives. Reunion smiles, hugs, "How was the flight?"s and "Good to see you!"s. A car pulls up, it's my Uncle Rob and my Grandma Jo. I load my things in and we're off, out into that sun. There's something about the roads here that feel so familiar and right. Wide, proud, unhurried and straight, they guide us through the desert in a sensical way. The drivers are red hot and impatient, they don't take time to savor or appreciate the pavement they roar across like I do from my backseat vantage point. Rushing and weaving like a sun devil himself is biting at their tires, I let my eyes gloss over and watch the brick patterns in the highway walls change. 

One exit ramp off one of the many sprawling interstates by my grandma's house looks like it goes straight up into the sky. It's like driving off the upturned edge at the bottom of a giant hillside slip and slide, sloping and dramatic, pulling driver and machine up into that flat blue expanse that wraps over the entirety of the world here. Eyes straining through the windshield, it's like looking up at the sky in the Truman show, or like being inside a desert themed snow globe that looks as though it has edges that make contact with the red dirt somewhere, always a bit out of sight, like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. At the last minute, the heaven bound offramp veers left and you let out the breath you didn't realize you were holding, back to reality and merging and no longer wondering if your car will become airborne.

Me and Uncle Rob took that off ramp on the way to my cousin's house on Saturday. We talked about music we like and I told him too much about my relationship. When we got there he dropped me off and then I watched Home Alone and a Christmas episode of Jessie and a Christmas episode of Glee and then a regular episode of Glee. My cousins had never seen Glee, I told them it was inappropriate for kids but they should be fine, to show them that I don't think of them a little kids (I secretly still do, but won't let them know that).

Sarah and her strange boyfriend Ranger picked me up later, with plans of digging in the dirt by the train tracks (actually, really, awesome right?). He drove like he was playing GTA, the lines didn't mean much to him evidently. I did deep breathing and reminded myself to stay on his good side because he had the weed, and I intended to smoke it. Ranger, and the rest of the men in Arizona, seem to lose their sense of self preservation once behind the wheel, the state has a collective habit of running red lights, and not wearing a helmet on their motorcycles. My desire to stay alive, however, is fully intact and was screaming at me, I was holding on to that little panic handle moms hold on to when their kid learns to drive in a flagrant show of fear of bodily harm. 

Some of my rock stacks

Anyway, finally, we arrived to the tracks in one piece and Sarah took a shallow black plastic soup ladle (you know the kind) out of her pocket to begin digging. It was for an art project, she found semi soft dirt after testing various areas and after I had given her an unhelpful tip to "Look for wet dirt," to which she replied, "There's no wet soil here anywhere, Kate," to which I replied "Oh, right," (I should've known). 

She drew large humanoid figures with waving arms and legs, outstretched limbs in motion like angels taking off or gently settling down again. I made rock stacks typically created by hikers who are lost and set up her phone in different prime time lapse angles (angel angles angel angles). Ranger did a spray paint thing on a wall nearby. He used gold, and light blue I think. It was dark, it could've been dark blue, I was none the wiser.

Writing this now, back in the infamous and secularly biblical Phoenix airport, I can still smell that fresh golden paint. Which is a great segue to the GIANT GOLD PUFFER JACKET I got at Buffalo exchange on Friday, I talked Sarah and Megan through my tried and true practice of manifesting exactly what you're in search of before even setting foot inside any kind of thrifting establishment. My speech went something like: "It is a cornucopia of opportunity in there and anyone scrounging for something good will quickly get lost or misled if they don't have a clear plan and vision of their ideal loot in mind." They kind of nodded politely and that was good enough for me.

My GOLD PUFFER JACKET

On this particular venture into the land o thrift, I was in need of some black boots for going out in Berlin, a warm jacket of some sort, some going out tops and other rave-esque items. Lo and behold, I found some good tops, a GOLD PUFFER JACKET, and a giant selection of black boots that were in my size. It was like something out of a movie, the collection of treasures I came away with. 

Jaw agape and shaking from the sheer power of my manifesting prowess, I looked at the rack of boots (all in my size??) that represented one of each of the various styles of boots that I had been looking at online (read that again!), laid out in front of me, tangible and materialized from the online sphere, for cheap cheap prices. I walked away with a pair of somewhat trendy (for a an anti-trend snob me, a big deal) black calf high moto boots, and waltzed out of their like the world was my oyster. 

Head inflated beyond belief from my scores in the Buffalo, we walked (I floated) across the street to buy mini cookies and an assortment of olives and a box of meat from the Whole Foods hot lunch bar and headed back to Sarah's place to smoke weed and watch Rick and Morty (duhhhh!) Ranger let me borrow bright green gel polish, the likes of which I have in my personal collection at home. 

As I'm writing this, back in the Phoenix airport, gate D3 to be precise, I have my eyes on a fellow traveler using the same iphone charger I have in my backpack at my feet, a standard white block with a lime green cord. Twin cords, matching with my nails. It's my favorite color right now, quintessential lime green that has come to mean "GO" in our society. While lifting weights at the LA fitness this morning I saw a geriatric man wearing the dopest bright lime green Beats headphones, I immediately looked them up on electronic bay (eBay) and will be buying. 

The Phoenix airport is the gateway to my favorite place to visit; grandma's house, desert air, loved ones, evil driving habits, swim meets, and the Tempe Buffalo Exchange. 

xo, kate