I don't really expect twenty hours of straight travel to be easy.
By the time we're packed and ready to leave the Cooks, though, I begin to feel a deep-seeded panic somewhere in the hollow of my chest. It is small, but it's insistent.
I realize that I'm not ready to go home. It's strange. After all this time I've been homesick, dreaming about my city, missing my life, and now it comes down to it and I am changing my mind. I'm not ready for this trip to be over.
I'm afraid that, once I arrive home, this entire past year will seem like an insignificant dream. Arriving in Auckland, hiking the Cape, the road trips, living in Wellington, Blenheim and Tauranga - the beaches, the glaciers, the people I've met - all of it will dissolve in ten minutes, as though it never existed. I'm not ready for that to happen.
We pay our departure fees and collect our boarding passes, but part of me feels like a cat being dragged to the bath, leaving my scratch-marks in the carpet. John looks at me and I smile. We board the plane.
My favourite part of flying is the take-off. I love the way the plane speeds up along the runway, the feeling of the tarmac disappearing, the tilt of the cabin and way the plane teeters in the air for a moment before finding the right current. It is also scary as hell. I clutch John's hand every time.
From the Cook Islands, our flight to LAX lasts about nine hours. Neither of us sleeps, we just watch our little television screens; and we are served two meals, neither one with a vegetarian option. At one point, John peeks through the blind to reveal an intense fuchsia sunrise. Grey clouds on the black ocean ripple across my view, like snow-covered ice floes in the Arctic. Then the sky seems to split open, and a red light cuts through everything. We chase the sunrise down. Thanks to the time difference, we arrive in the afternoon, more than twelve hours after our take-off.
Next we settle in for a seven-hour stopover, which we spend broke and bored in the airport, fidgeting and watching the clock. To be fair, several hours of our wait is spent in a line-up, shuffling slowly toward a customs counter. When we finally step up, I'm told to wait my turn - since John and I aren't married, we're not considered a family and therefore have to suffer through customs individually. Later, we circle the entire airport on the shuttle, looking for our Air Canada gate - only to find that it is Gate 2, the gate we arrived at. The departure area is upstairs, and although I'm glad we're in no hurry, I do wonder why there's no sign about that.
Finally, we board the flight to Vancouver - the final leg of our journey. It's over in three hours.
My favourite part of coming home is the moment I see my sister Amelia. She is waiting for me at the airport, and I can hardly wait to drop my bags and hug her, and she dances me around the airport like we are kids and nobody is watching. I see myself in her eyes. We are spinning around ballroom-style, looking at each other with the exact same expression, thinking to ourselves: she looks so different. Her eyes are more feline than I remember, more green.
We spend the night at Millie's, which is a beautiful apartment, clean and comfortable. There are hardwood floors, shadow-boxes, framed photographs, instruments, a terrarium. The walls are brightly painted and the many houseplants are vibrantly alive. I feel strangely proud of her. The next morning, my sister serves up the best breakfast I've had in at least a year: perfect crepes with fresh fruit salad (it's summer here - there are local berries, peaches, figs), yogurt, real bacon (none for me), real coffee (French-press style). Then Matt drives us to the sky train, and we all promise we'll see each other soon.
Standing on the deck of the ferry, the panic I feel increases. I am almost home. It is all over. I'm home.
No comments:
Post a Comment