Goodbyes...

Keita:Do you like Marx?

Sayid: I haven’t met him.

Keita: No, no, he’s dead.

Sayid: Why, what happened?

Keita: No, no, he died long ago.

[Sayid thought the guy Marx had just died]

Sayid: So then, why are you asking me if he died long ago?

Keita: No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor.

Sayid: Mmmh. Sounds amazing. [He searches his pockets and pulls out car keys and a packet of cigarettes. He just holds them in his hands] Hey Keita man, how long you think it takes to get famous?

Keita: For a musician or a painter? Or a taxi driver? [Sayid is a taxi driver. He is Pakistani. Keita is from Mali.]

Sayid: Whatever…Famous.

Keita: Four years!!??? Six to get rich!!? [Keita has a puzzling tone of speech. His sentences are something between a question and an exclamation, always, as though he is not sure of what he is saying. He will surprise you, though. He has seen a lot of different people. He has seen a lot of life…and he draws from it. His father was a cattle trader in the Sahel. As a boy he tagged along sometimes and saw how deals were struck and how fortune was made, or lost. A tall, easy chap with a benign smile, he now sells coffee and donuts at the airport. He holds out a cigarette lighter and Sayid lights his cigarette and takes a deep puff, and then slowly lets the smoke seep from his nose and the corners of his mouth, like steam seeping from a pan of boiling fish, with the lid sitting at an angle. They are looking at the mass of humanity pulling briefcases, connecting flights, catching up with time. People rushing to or from places. A people that doesn’t belong] But first, you see, you are going to have to dress right, you know? Then you’re going to have to hang out with famous people. Make friends with the right kind of people. Go to the right parties, yeah? Socialite.

      Sayid and Keita met by chance twelve years ago at this airport. The winds of fate blew them slowly from their places of birth towards each other, getting them ready for that final collision of destinies – that crossing of paths that would also be the start of a great friendship. Fate indeed was the quiet hand that toiled to bridge the 10,000 mile chasm between their lives -  lives that started out avoiding each other. Lives on parallel paths, like ships in the dark, destined for separate harbors.

      Now they sit, these two friends, chatting about Marx and fame, and some other dull stuff, killing boredom, watching lives transition – people rushing to meetings, interviews, to see loved ones. Others running away to plant their lives elsewhere. To new beginnings. Greener pastures.

      Transient life; that is what airports are. A temporary habitation for people who are on their way to someplace. As they wait they stare into their phones, typing. A people wired, tweeting, updating statuses, in touch with the rest of the world. Some slump on the cold steel chairs, nursing warm cups of latte, heads resting on their luggage. They stand up. They stroll. They read novels. They reach out to others like them and strike conversations. Mundane stuff usually. They are lonely people waiting to go.

      Sayid and Keita sit there in quiet, watching, each man soaking in the moment. It is a scene they have witnessed play one too many times but each with a slight variation. Sayid looks at it through the puff of smoke, a filter of sorts that puts things in perspective. There is a couple at the terminal. She is about 25, terribly beautiful. She is the sort of woman who walks on glass heels even when she’s in flat shoes. The sort who insults you and leaves you feeling that perhaps she is right. He looks older. Early 30’s maybe. They are bidding farewell and so they hug and cling so hard on each other, like identical fetuses, shut out from the humdrum of the airport lounge and the people all around them. He is in a brown leather jacket, corduroy pants and worn running shoes. A man with a good taste. He is pulling a small red and posh suitcase, her suitcase. She is in a light grey high-collar sweater and blue skinny jeans that hugs her frame. A black leather purse hangs on her left shoulder. She is a delight. She is a real beauty, like the sunset.

      They kiss with an unnerving urgency. They kiss with a craving deep and knowing; a searching kiss that without a doubt stirs something tender inside those that are watching – or pretending not to watch. Her eyes are shut tight, as if she is in pain or in a deep agony. But his eyes are not closed; they remain half open, as if to watch out for something, as if he is afraid of losing her. This action – him kissing with eyes wide open like a Nile Perch - would have looked uncanny or even morbid by many standards of intimacy, but it doesn’t; instead it looks raw and somewhat unworldly.

      They occasionally let go of this tight embrace and look fixedly into each other’s eyes, a long drilling gaze that seems more spiritual than romantic. He is saying something to her; his lips are moving, and she is nodding her head, bobbing, agreeing. Desperately agreeing to everything he is saying. Her eyes never leave his. Not once. Her lips quiver faintly. From his seat, Keita can see her heart throbbing against the base of her neck, a rapid thudding drumming away against her ebony flesh.

      All around them life in the airport continues unconcerned, insensitive even. It never stops to tip a hat, to notice. People walk hurriedly past them pulling their luggage, dragging their grumpy kids by the hand. The disembodied voice announces the flights about to board and the flights that have been delayed. And while the starry-eyed couple try to immortalize this final moment together, the flight schedules up on the board change and blink constantly, the huge clock above them also keeping pace, urging time to catch up with them, to cut them short…to yank them apart.

      Sayid and Keita don’t mind staring at the couple. They offer welcome reprieve from their boredom. They intrigue. Sayid wonders how long they have been dating. He wonders if they ever disagree on anything. He wonders what they do for a living. He wonders if distance would grind their relationship into dust, or if he would meet someone else as pretty, or who kissed so purposefully or even has half her grace and easy self assurance.

The man is travelling light. But then again, maybe he is connecting flights and his luggage is already 25,000 feet over Mecca.

       Wait a minute! Something is staring back at you here. Some devil in the detail. A pedestrian look would observe romance and passion in this couple’s kiss, but a closer observation reveals something else; horror and devastation. It occurs to Keita, who is keenly watching, that they kiss passionately not because they are so in love, but because they are confronted by a reality that they are not ready to heed. A horror that they would never rekindle this moment, this feeling, this passion with which they kiss and feel about each other. They are faced with a handicap of not being able to dictate their destiny, time and distance because time – like distance – does heal yes, but it also destroys. Mercilessly. Their future is an endless desert fraught with the unknown, maybe they would last, maybe they would break up, maybe the next time they meet the magic will have vanished. Maybe. Maybe.

       When her flight is finally called out, they disentangle from each other grudgingly, painfully. She is on a flight to Tokyo. Yes Tokyo, Japan. Something like a smirk forms on Sayid’s face. He wants to laugh. Maybe there’s something he knows about Tokyo that the rest of humanity doesn’t. You know Sayid can be such a jerk when he’s sitting at an airport.

       Anyway, you need to have been here to witness the tragedy that ensues when this couple let go of each other. It is not something that can be relayed without losing certain silent but salient and most poignant body language of these two. This is something that has been lost forever. It cannot be reproduced.

The flight announcement comes as a knife that not only sears through them like a bolt of heat, but tears them apart with such shocking violence. He grabs, yes he grabs, and pulls her against him so tightly that not even a spirit could squeeze between them. Her head rests on his chest and she is smelling the leather no doubt, a smell she will not forget in a long time. They stand comatose, two grotesque avatars of desperation. Two failing hearts. Two metaphors of love’s tragic evil.

      She cries so wretchedly against his chest. Against that leather. Keita momentarily looks away. She claws at his back, shrinking his leather jacket into a fistful of torment. Her whole body convulses with every tear. He holds her close, his nose buried into her hair, smelling her, taking her every scent like a tracking dog would. It’s a scent he won’t forget in a hurry. He will be walking down a street – many months or years later – and a slight breeze will momentarily carry that whiff past his face, and he will stop dead in his tracks, in the middle of the busy street, his heart galloping away with memories of her, and despise the ones who try too hard.

       They finally let go, but it’s not out of necessity. Rather, out of a disturbing sense of purpose. If this was a movie, you’d want to stop and rewind the moment when their bodies separate. And then play it again in slow motion, because that’s how it seems like; life in slow motion. She avoids his eyes. She takes a step back, sniffy and teary. She bends and grabs her suitcase. She mumbles something under her breath then takes a deep breath then attempts a smile but all that she manages is a fractured smile, a broken smile.

She then does something strange; she briefly places the palm of her hand against his chest – as if dispatching some sort of power through him – then she walks away. He slowly turns and watches her walk away. She doesn’t look back. Not once. As she walks away she stares at the floor. Her luggage suddenly weigh an elephant and a squirrel. She walks briskly but deliberately through the check-in gate and soon she is swallowed by a throng (the “r” in this last word makes a huge difference hehehe. Linguists’ sense of humor sure runs deep). Soon she is part of a homogenous mass of faceless humanity on the move. Soon she is not the gorgeous girl who mirrors the sunset, but just a moving part of an airport. She is just a statistic.

      Her boyfriend massages his brow lightly with his hand. Sayid and Keita try not to look at his face, more out of courtesy than anything else. Call it a manly respect. He needs the privacy to moan, that is their way of eulogizing what they just witnessed. Or maybe it’s because they don’t want to see the vulnerability of manhood in his face. It is something painful, because at that moment you are reminded of your own vincibility. He walks a few steps to one of the steel chairs at the lounge and sits, an action that seems to take all his energy. Meanwhile, the airport continues to stir and rev. It has no time for his pains. And while it seems that the show has ended for everyone who has been watching, the show is just starting for him. And her.