waystations
YHZ - YYZ
I associate flying into Toronto with fear. The first time I ever did it, in 2017, I wrote a little stream of terrified consciousness into the notebook I was carrying with me. I didn’t want to name the thing that had made me so afraid, so I wrote something insane about wishing I had been an oceanographer, instead. The inflight map indicated all the trenches in the ocean, a secret world of geology that I (a known ocean liker) had not heretofore considered. It made me terribly wistful for the dark still pressure I imagined at the deepest reaches of the Atlantic, precarious as I was at ten thousand feet and sinking.
Tonight I am writing in my phone’s Notes app, because it is 2022, and now there are phone chargers on many if not most planes.
The plane always turns back on itself to land here. The world appears in the window at a weird and vertiginous angle, splotches of light and starless darkness split in two by a wrong horizon. It makes me nervous every time, though once I’m in the air I am usually a fairly serene flier. Takeoff and landing, that’s what fucks me. The transitional states. I am safe when I am inert, which does nothing to explain why I continue to insist on travel.
Atlanta, Georgia
I snatched maybe an hour of sleep on the flight between Toronto and Atlanta, which left at roughly 6am. It is now 3pm, and I have been in Atlanta airport for approaching six hours.
I thought I was being careful. I have never had an unfraught experience transiting through Toronto Pearson; I figured that leaving earlier in the day would minimise the risk of horrors. It did! The plane left on time. This was unfortunate, because it has left me in airport purgatory literally all day, with no opportunity to lie down or rest or be alone.
My friends are waiting for me in Baton Rouge. A hurricane is threatening Halifax on the day I’m due to fly back home. I came so close to bottling this whole trip; to chalking my non-refundable tickets up to a loss and staying home to prepare for the potential storm. I’ve never dealt with hurricanes before. Honestly, if anything, I’d expected to have to worry about them in Louisiana – not in Nova Scotia, which shows you what I know.
Forward momentum. If I’d stayed home I would have ended up weathering my first hurricane – tropical cyclone, whatever it is by the time it hits Cape Breton – with very little to divert me. I do not love being trapped in Atlanta, however temporarily; at the next gate over, I just witnessed a spontaneous round of applause for the US military, which made me feel like I had clipped through an invisible seam in reality. But at least I am going somewhere. My singular, wretched hope: that when I arrive in Somewhere, Louisiana, I can collapse directly into a bed and remain there until my friend gets married.
ATL - BTR
God alone knows what tomorrow is going to look like. I’m so tired; I don’t want to be around people; I wish Isaac were here, so I could feel seen in the way I want to feel seen whenever I’m not doing well. He doesn’t try to claim that it will be okay; he just understands, and he sympathises. I am a hateful contrarian and I never want to hear that it will all be okay, because I can never believe it. I want to be told that my feelings are comprehensible, even when they’re so far removed from reality that they’re not even in orbit – which is often the case, owing to the fact that I am mentally ill.
The plane has all its shutters drawn to mitigate the heat. I feel adrift in space and time, just far enough removed from anything familiar to question whether I have landed on the surface of the sun.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
The hurricane has postponed my final flight home. I’m staying overnight in Toronto again on Saturday, in the hope that the airport will be back up and running by Sunday evening. On one hand, I’m stressed about what could happen to my apartment in my absence; on the other hand, there’s nothing I can do, and at least I have places to go both in case of emergency and during my unexpected layover.
The wedding is beautiful. I sit in the front row beside a friend I’ve only ever known online, and he nudges me part-way through the ceremony to show me his smart watch. Elevated heart rate, it says, and I know the fucking feeling.
There are so many people here that I’ve wanted to meet in person for years. I fell in with this community at a weird and dislocated time in my life, and now, years later, so many of us have converged on this moment. For a few hours I manage not to think about anything but where I am and who I am with.
The day after the wedding, because I cannot stop being myself for literally any longer than the moment requires of me, I bail early on a friend hang to lie down by myself in bed and panic about not being able to check in for the next day’s flights online. Two discrete airlines reassure me that my booking is all in order. I believe neither one.
BTR - ATL
I’m watching what I think isn’t the Mississippi River. It’s like a silver ribbon, wiggling its way across an unfamiliar landscape. One of the only things I remember with any clarity from geography lessons at school: rivers, when they bend in ways that aren’t efficient, form oxbow lakes where the water has found a more direct route. All those beautiful kinks in the flow become standing water, remnants of a more complicated time.
The Not-Mississippi has not done this. Its wiggles remain intact. Love that for them, honestly.
I have been befriending southern ladies at the airport. We were delayed by about an hour, and I would have climbed the walls and started shrieking in tongues from the ceiling if not for these very gracious people, willing to keep me busy. I bonded with a woman named Josephine over pets, walking, and hurricanes (I have learned that this is the sole advantage of hurricanes: you become a member of an elite club of hurricane knowers, which means you are allowed to commiserate about hurricanes). She told me that my fiancé was ‘a cutie,’ which is factually accurate. I’m probably more sanguine about the chaos of flying than I have any right to be, as a result.
Mainly I’m relieved to be on the way. I liked Baton Rouge, but it scared me; I couldn’t get traction, between the heat and the humidity and the stress of the hurricane at home. I want to get back to where I can understand the ground beneath my feet.
Toronto, Ontario
(I didn’t write anything in Toronto. I did take this photo of my friend’s wonderful dog, though; his name is Harvey and he spent the night with me on the couch.)
YYZ - YHZ
It’s pitch black outside as we make the approach to Halifax. I know we are probably too high to see anything but night-time cloud at the window, but I can’t keep the thought out of my head: there’s no power. Of course I can’t see anything from the sky in the dark.
There’s no power at my building, specifically. I had milk and cheese and yoghurt in the fridge, and I can’t stop thinking about how rotten they’ll be whenever I get back. I am going to my friend’s mother’s place (which does have power) tonight – she’s picking me up from the airport – and I am glad, now, that I went to this wedding. If I hadn’t gone, I would likely have spent the entire hurricane at her place, wishing I had flown.
It’s hard to explain how apocalyptic I feel. I want to know when things will be set to rights, and the unbearable fact is that I can’t know. It’s out of my hands. Every time my brain brushes up too closely against that uncertainty, I am instantly overwhelmed with the urgent need to cry. It’s so stupid! I have a safe place to go when I land! At least this way I will be near to home, even if I’m not quite there.
(A TV show I love once posited that ‘close’ is worse than nothing. For reasons already discussed, I am simply not having that thought right now.)
Halifax, Nova Scotia
I’m not quite home. Trying to balance gratitude for the kindness of my adoptive Canadian family with abject (and autistic) horror at this dislocation from my regular life.
The estimated restoration time for my power is, I think, Tuesday night. I am staying where I am (and where the power is) tonight, and we will figure out the rest in the morning. I’m trying to get as much work done as I can while I am in a place with an internet connection, but it’s hard to focus. I have added ‘no hurricanes’ to my very short list of ‘things I blithely took for granted about England.’
I’ve written before about my fears for this move – specifically, the worry that if something went wrong, I would have no safety net to support me, and no context with which to respond appropriately on my own. I don’t enjoy being in a situation where I have had to test that theory. But if this experience has shown me anything, it’s that I do have a safety net, actually. I have friends in Toronto who let me stay at very short notice when my flight was rescheduled. I have friends who gave me the space I needed to wrangle logistics and panic and recover after the wedding, despite the fact that we had limited time together. I have the person I’m staying with, who outright calls me her family, and who didn’t hesitate to come out and collect me from the airport when I got in touch.
I spend a lot of time questioning my own wherewithal, but half of wherewithal is the support with which you surround yourself. I made the smartest choice I could have made when I moved to a place where I knew I would have connections. The power will come back and I’ll go home and I will remember all the people who helped. It’s not much of a balm right now, but I am going to get there in a day or two.