It’s happening again. I can feel it. It’s a phenomenon with which I’m all too familiar. I’m sitting here at Gate A6 in St. Louis Lambert International Airport with my carry-on in tow and a Marry Karr book by my side when a great sense of sadness floods over me. I knew it was coming. It started out earlier in the day as a tiny darkness deep in my belly. It poked me awake actually. I call this oddity “airport sadness.”

It makes an appearance nearly every single time I fly. Regardless of the occasion, it always begins the same. I wake up on the travel day with a kernel of dread. It’s a small but noticeable presence. It grows heavier and heavier as the day goes on and gets more intense as I make my way to the airport. By the time I step foot into the terminal, that small kernel of dread has evolved into full-blown despondency. I’ve been known to hold back tears by the time I board the plane.

It’s worth taking a personal inventory of this phenomenon to determine the exact cause of Airport Sadness (AS). My first observation is that AS must certainly be unrelated to the airport itself. Sure, flying isn’t particularly fun. I still get baffled by the degrading amount of dressing and undressing that one has to do in order to get on a plane to Tampa. The sardine-like security lines and overpriced Airport Food (AF) aren’t exactly a comfort either. They lead to constipation of both body and soul. Everyone’s collective anxiety is infectious and getting drunk before your flight can be cost prohibitive. Nevertheless, those unpleasant aspects of air travel can’t be the cause of making a grown man want to cry.

No, I think the root of this Pavlovian response to airports is connected to my personal flying history. According to family lore, we went on a vacation to California when I was 3, which would have included flying there from St. Louis. It’s entirely possible that my family went without me and made the whole thing up. I don’t remember. So in the absence of reliable accounts of that trip, we’ll say my first time on a plane was an 8^th grade trip to New York.

It was April and I was soon to graduate from middle school while my sister Shannon was about to graduate high school. Our family lineage includes numerous PhDs, Masters, JDs, and MDs, therefore schooling is kind of a big deal. My grandparents and aunt graciously thought to mark the occasion with a trip to the Big Apple.

I was hell-bent on this being the most stupendous trip of my entire 8^th grade life. Up to that point, the most magical place I had visited was Pensacola. The theatre bug already bit me and we were about to travel to the epicenter of it all: The Great White Way. For weeks on end I prepared for our trip. I created a master list of all the things I wanted to do. Broadway, Times Square, The Statue of Liberty, Museums, The Met. I got books on all things NYC. Basically I had rehearsed the vacation and was ready for opening night.

The day finally arrived. Shannon and I traveled from STL to La Guardia by ourselves and I was beside myself with excitement. Our two hour flight included free soda and peanuts?! It was like Christmas without the leg room. As our plane descended into a rainy and gloomy Queens, I could barely contain myself. Thankfully I didn’t need to play it cool for very long. Our Aunt Jennifer was waiting for us with a taxi once we landed. She was just as giddy as I was, if not more. She’s someone who loves to give gifts and this was the penultimate of all gifts. Screaming and giggling ensued.

I’ll never forget that cab ride from Queens into Midtown. It was one of my first encounters with mysticism. My eyes were glued to the window that looked out onto the city that seemed to hold all the dreams for my future.

That trip really did become a once in a lifetime experience. Everyone remembers their first time to New York and mine was no exception. I saw my first Broadway show (Rent) and my first opera (La bohème). We went to the Guggenheim and saw an exhibit where wax scrotums dangled from everyday objects. I saw the Statue of Liberty and ate at a diner with a singing wait staff. Something inside of me woke up.

After a week of adventure and dreams and carbs, Shannon and I board a plane that returns us to our Midwestern lives. Earlier that morning, I woke up in our hotel room with a heaviness in my gut that would eventually morph into good ol’ Airport Sadness (AS). Of course no one ever wants a great vacation to end, but this was something different. Something deeper.

In hindsight I realize the dread of getting back on that plane was actually a manifestation of the fear I held for my future. When I got back to St. Louis I would have a few more weeks of school followed by a blissful summer followed by moving to Georgia and leaving all I had ever known behind. The fear of that major life transition bubbled up to the surface as my sister pulled me through La Guardia’s terminal.

That 8^th grade trip set precedence for most all my future air travel and AS has been with me ever since. When I was 18 I lived in Chicago for a somewhat tumultuous year. During that period I visited my family in Atlanta at least 5 times. Every time I got back on a plane to Chicago I panicked about the untethered life I was returning to. Same thing when I lived in Los Angeles. My visits to Atlanta and St. Louis during those two years were an escape from the anxiety and crushing rejection that dominated my life as an Angeleno.

Deep down AS is a fear of a future unknown. Maybe deeper still it’s the fear of returning to a life unsatisfied.

Even now I’m living as comfortable of a life as I can while still being broke and professionally unfulfilled. I’m surrounded by family and loads of friends. I’ve been around the block enough to know the landscape of Atlanta and to master it, more or less. Yet here I sit at Gate A6 in St. Louis Lambert International Airport with a lump in my throat and anxiety in my chest.

So what’s to be done? The eternal optimist in me wants to find some silver lining. Airport Sadness may never go away but let’s not give it too much power. Temporary melancholy ain’t a cancer diagnosis. And what if I looked at it as an opportunity. Maybe I could reflect on the joy of the trip I just experienced. Maybe I could hold onto whatever inspiration I found on my travels and carry that over into the life that awaits me when I land. Maybe the sadness is simply a lesson in itself and my job as student is to find peace within it. Either way I’ve got a whole life of traveling ahead of me and AS appears to be my ride-or-die whether I like it or not. At the end of the day, airports are really just an imaginary bubble where homeless travel-weary refugees are caught between a hello and a good-bye. Maybe the answer to AS lies in which one of those I choose to focus on.

 

**Please note that Roman Holiday Pt. 2 is on it’s way. Fear not, I will finish that story for you.