Chicken Scratch: Unforgettable and already gone — by Elizabeth Beggins

Lare* and I cross paths for the first time in Security, he painting a smile across a sideways remark about livestock, me hoping the freezer pack in my lunch box isn’t so defrosted as to have become liquid. I meant to stash it in my checked luggage, but in the process of assimilating into sheep culture, it slipped my mind. Pockets need emptying, but remarkably, shoes are allowed to stay on. That also amuses Lare, who shows up at the gate adjacent to mine a few minutes later, face bright behind the thin-framed glasses that match his physique.He takes the seat beside me and continues with his stream of jovial commentary. He’s so affable I can’t help but enjoy him as he tells me about spending some years in D.C. and losing his mother before moving back to the west coast, about how he used to be a marathoner but gave it up when his knees got cranky, about his sister the nurse and his surrogate grandmother. He offers to share his Mentos, explaining that he loves a pre-flight candy binge to bring on a solid crash during travel. I barely notice the unfortunate word choice.Muscling my bag into the overhead with gratitude for arms still strong enough to get it there, I uproot the men already in place to take my A-seat for the duration of the shorter leg of this so-long journey. Neither meets my eye, which feels like a relief at this point.

Just after takeoff, I discover that the pronounced vibration in the plastic sheathing around the window stops when I push my hand against it. Stop, start. Stop, start. Stop. Start. I can’t maintain the pressure needed to shut it down completely, so I make a note to tell a flight attendant about the rattle, and about how my seat cushion scoots forward and back like the glider on my grandmother’s porch. But I never do.

From where I take off, the trip to Sydney, Australia takes close to 24 hours in the air.

Melissa and I are delighted no one claims the seat between us for the 13-hour flight down under. She’s from Brooklyn by way of Connecticut, flying halfway around the world for her cousin’s wedding. She has already traveled to 42 countries in her 31 years and is allergic to caffeine. I tell her I’ve never met anyone like that before. She’s following an app meant to reduce jet lag by encouraging a close approximation of the schedule she’s left behind. She plans to stay awake until 7 AM, but I notice, as I come to consciousness for the fourth time in three hours, that by 4:15 she’s given in.

We are travelers, each of us making our way to and through places we cannot stay, places we don’t call home, places we do.

The people I leave tell me they can’t wait to hear about my trip—a destination 10,000 miles from where they are, a place most are unlikely to visit. They imagine water swirling in the opposite direction. They picture moon phases out of sync. I tell them it’s the birdsong that’s different, and that the tree trunks look like elephant legs. A childlike part of me marvels that I don’t fall up, that gravity works the same everywhere I am.

The people I meet who find out I’m American lift their eyebrows and hold their mouths in shapes that seem to ask how I’m getting on and what I’m doing about it. Some seem sorry.

Ficus rubiginosa: Commonly, Port Jackson Fig. But I’ll always think of elephants.

There’s the hulking gallery manager, representing whimsical art, who gives the impression that he’s just there for the job. He offloads his thoughts on racism and sexism, says Hamilton isn’t worth seeing because it’s not historically accurate, argues that reimagining James Bond perpetuates the problem. We don’t need a 007 in different packaging, he says, we need a 006 and a 008 who are equally compelling. His American niece called him a pig.

There are the dog lovers. So many dog lovers. Park goers and beach walkers, outdoor diners and shop owners, construction workers and kids in school uniforms turn their heads, reach their arms, bend, crouch, coo, smile, as if this is the tonic they’ve needed for longer than they can remember. They are not concerned about my accent or my president; they just crave the temporarily available, unbridled, unconditional affection of a dog. Who could fault them for that?

The indomitable Frenchie my daughter borrows on the regular.

Like pups making our way through the streets, tucking eagerly into stores where we know we’ll be rewarded with snacks, we are transient beings looking to give and receive attention. We are creatures of appetite and recognition, hungry for tenderness.

We pass through places and people the way a scent settles into hair, a voice lodges in the gut, unforgettable and already gone.

At the Italian restaurant, Adrian and Joya insert themselves into our conversation—or maybe it’s the other way around—but no one cares how we come to be leaning forward in our chairs and into each other’s stories. We just do. We are expats and migrants, we are commuters across borders, we miss each other, our families, our food, our cultures. We travel. We speak of sun signs and politics. They say we’re teaching kids things they’re not ready for. She says I look peaceful. He says what’s happening in Gaza can’t be helped. I want to say that’s a goddamn lie. I want to say that everything good we shared up to that point just crumbled like ruined buildings, and children, and dreams. But I don’t. I don’t, because I don’t know enough about who he is, because nothing felt all wrong until then, because we are transient, because nothing I say will matter to him, which is also a lie, or at least not the only truth.

We are made for movement, yet we hold to the familiar, settle when we might venture.

Nestor pushes me along in the wheelchair I requested to meet me at the jet bridge when I land in Los Angeles again after two weeks away. Mobility issues, I say, which is true only because I don’t trust my ability to make it from point A to point B in the hour I have to make it happen. Baggage, customs, security. There is a story from a previous trip that ends with arriving after the doors to the plane are closed, after my anxiety has turned to anger, after I’m no longer the person I want to be. An hour is just not enough time for most anyone, and certainly not for someone who loses herself in familiar places.

So Nestor and I chatter as he navigates my temporary chariot down ramps and into elevators, through deserted areas and populated corridors, out the door and back in again. He says he only gets outside for international flights. He says he moved from the Philippines the same year I was married. He says he has a 20-year-old son who he hopes will go to college. He says he bought his house when Obama was president. He says he has no idea what anyone will do now when they can’t work enough jobs to buy a house, least of all his son. He talks about the elderly man, in his 90s he wants to say, who lost track of himself yesterday, accused Nestor of kidnapping him, required police intervention. He wants to know if I’ve traveled to a Third World country. America, he says, is still the best place to live. Americans, he says, are spoiled.

We are travelers. Even when we are home, even when our luggage is emptied and we’re back in our own bed.

My second born, the real purpose of my journey, is 28 now with a new city, a new partner, and a language I don’t speak. I watch my children build lives I can’t quite follow them into. I love them, I let them go, I love them desperately, still. The pain of parting is sharp, tracing the border where presence fades and absence settles.

It’s one of the hardest things we do, daring to give ourselves over, and over, to what we can’t keep.

Palm Beach, a suburb in the Northern Beaches region of Greater Sydney, NSW.

I found that out again on the morning of my third day home. A woman I once worked with, who I still cross paths with from time to time–someone I think of as a friend–has stopped treatment. She’s in hospice now.** She’s just a little younger than me.

This news sits beside me, a traveler neither burden nor blessing. I think of her and of what we carry: worn arms, words folded in, hearts that crack and heal, kindness shared without measure, and the letting go that comes.

~~~~~~~

*In the interest of privacy, all names in this story were changed.
**Shortly after this piece was published, I learned she’d passed away.