The flight now seems interminable. I’m looking at a row of seats next to me with screens flickering various stages of recent blockbusters. Ben Stiller is still running amok in museums while Arnold rises, buck-naked elsewhere. Staccato gunfire echoes from someone’s headphones that are way too loud. The steady hum of the jet makes you wonder “Don’t they build sound dampers into this damn thing?”
The end of a vacation is a time of ‘epic suckage’ (to use a recent hip expression I picked up from an acquaintance). Security checks, removing shoes and belts, metal detector passes. Things you grinned and bore with a song your lips on the way out here suddenly become onerous.
Every moment is fraught. “This may be the last time I drink coffee here.” (though, at the back of your mind, you know you’re going to come back. Soon.) Wistfulness sets in even before the trip is over. You look at photos in the tiny screen of a camera, trying to hold on to something that is slipping away, fast.
*sigh*. It’s time to stop fretting. Life as you have known it for years now awaits on the other side of the Atlantic. You try to switch off this feeling of dread by tuning in to the bizarre pleasures of The Hangover.
This was written on the flight out from Zurich to JFK after a most enjoyable 10-day vacation. More posts on the vacation itself coming soon. This was unfortunately the most well thought out of the paper posts from my diary, so this goes up first. Last-In-First-Out, stack-style.
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