Waiting in Airports
folder
Angst › General
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
1
Views:
812
Reviews:
0
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Category:
Angst › General
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
1
Views:
812
Reviews:
0
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The Author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.
Waiting in Airports
This is my story with all my own charecters. If you are for some reason inspired by this feel free to take some of the ideas, but please don\'t print out my work and call it your own. Also, this is my first piece of work I have posted on the internet so any reviews will be helpful (including flames).
The noise, the monotonous whirring sound that penetrates the glass we gaze through. The engines spin into motion and the plane juts forward like a precautions toddler before speeding forward and conquering the runway. She is up in the air now, gripping the edges of seat 22D as the plane climbs higher and higher as she effortlessly gains distance from the life that she had.
Three weeks ago after dinner she came up to me as I was slipping on my yellow plastic gloves and adding parsimonious amounts of soap to a weary sponge. She rung her hands in an attempt to rid them of the nervous sweat, and pushed the thick words out of her mouth, trying to construct a perfect explanation but instead it came out as a sloppy sandcastle. "Granma, I'm leaving in three weeks." The thickly cut juice glass I was holding dropped in the sink, and rolleout out in the soapy water. I felt her eyes on me, stairing into the side of my face but instead of meeting the gaze I grabbed the next gravy soaked plate and continued washing. My eyes focused on the shape of the bubbles, and how they formed islands which roamed together until the water stirs and they break apart, to continue their sailing alone. "Granma, I'm not happy here... and this boy... this great guy who held a conference at my school..." Its not a school. You can hardly even call it an education! Its this group that rents out a room in the Community College and holds classes on Mondays and Thursdays at 10pm. It was the only program I could get her into, considering she started failing all of her classes after her mother died. No actual college would accept her; high school failure in a no name town West Virginia. "...He wants me to... to live with him Granma. He loves me."
My chest is in a meat grinder, with silence calking my ears with cement. I place the plate in the dish rack and pull out the drain plug. I grab the fingers of my gloves and pull them off one by one, first the left hand and then the right. I turn to her and grab her hand. They warm and smooth against mine. My dry skin folds like white threadbare sheets in wrinkles and lines, creating a roadmap of my life woes and tears. I hold her hands in mine, yet no matter how tight I grasp them I can not keep her wrapwithwithin my flesh. I know she is already lost. I know, because half a century ago I too was lost to my own family.
I left home for a man that I didn't love, and I kept house for family that never cared. I raised children who were unappreciative, and gave money that was spent fruitlessly. A shared a bed with a man who thought more of a cold beer and a Sunday football game than the woman living awake next to him. Yet I never thought to leave them, to grab my bags and get on a train and go to some far corner of the country. No, I stayed "“ along with my tupperware collection, the empty suitcases, and my mother's gold rimmed glasses which I would nightly fill with bourbon. I stayed here with the dark rooms and the abandoned feelings, the loneliness that plagued me nightly long after Richard fell asleep.
I helped her prepare for this life she is willingly walkintointo. I helped her pack her bags, and listened to her mindless chattering about her new life that awaits her. I heard about his dogs, and the way he wears his glasses just so. She chirped like a newborn chicken. So hopeful. So nieve.
This morning I watched Richard hobble uneasily on the limb which is practically dead flesh as he carried her bags to the car. He closed the trunk and turned back to the house and called to me in the voice which hardly seems romantic anymore, telling me to grab his cane. This is what she is leaving for, for a life serving an unappreciative man. I muttered a prayer as she pranced out the door in her new shirt she got especially to see him today. She was too lost in the prospect of love to know the consequences of walking through the terminal and onto that plane.
At the terminal I turned to her, grasping her arm like a vise and leaned into her saying "Dear, promise to me that you will come home if... if it doesn't work out.", but she shrugged off my question with another story about him, and how wonderful he is. And now I stand here, against the darkness that surrounds my old and tiered body. The anger and regret ran through me, for being like her and giving away my life. My mind screams at me for doing nothing with my life, for being no one at all. When I die no one will read the obituaries and say "Oh I remember hearing about her.." And it screams at me for not stopping that plane which is climbing in the sky like a sheet of newsprint caught in an updraft. My wrinkled hand raises to my face to wipe away the mascara which runs down in my pain.
Has it really taken me 56 years to realize what I wed into? Did it really take me this long to see how empty and void my life has been? What is there to represent this life? What is there to represent 78 years of wasted breath? Peanut butter sandwiches, stacks of ironed clothing, the countless hours of soap operas, or the darkness which accompanies the lonely feelings that plague my existence? Or maybe it is my decrepit body which stands in this terminal beside a man I don't love, watching my granddaughter travel farther and farther away. Or maybe, it's nothing at all...
The noise, the monotonous whirring sound that penetrates the glass we gaze through. The engines spin into motion and the plane juts forward like a precautions toddler before speeding forward and conquering the runway. She is up in the air now, gripping the edges of seat 22D as the plane climbs higher and higher as she effortlessly gains distance from the life that she had.
Three weeks ago after dinner she came up to me as I was slipping on my yellow plastic gloves and adding parsimonious amounts of soap to a weary sponge. She rung her hands in an attempt to rid them of the nervous sweat, and pushed the thick words out of her mouth, trying to construct a perfect explanation but instead it came out as a sloppy sandcastle. "Granma, I'm leaving in three weeks." The thickly cut juice glass I was holding dropped in the sink, and rolleout out in the soapy water. I felt her eyes on me, stairing into the side of my face but instead of meeting the gaze I grabbed the next gravy soaked plate and continued washing. My eyes focused on the shape of the bubbles, and how they formed islands which roamed together until the water stirs and they break apart, to continue their sailing alone. "Granma, I'm not happy here... and this boy... this great guy who held a conference at my school..." Its not a school. You can hardly even call it an education! Its this group that rents out a room in the Community College and holds classes on Mondays and Thursdays at 10pm. It was the only program I could get her into, considering she started failing all of her classes after her mother died. No actual college would accept her; high school failure in a no name town West Virginia. "...He wants me to... to live with him Granma. He loves me."
My chest is in a meat grinder, with silence calking my ears with cement. I place the plate in the dish rack and pull out the drain plug. I grab the fingers of my gloves and pull them off one by one, first the left hand and then the right. I turn to her and grab her hand. They warm and smooth against mine. My dry skin folds like white threadbare sheets in wrinkles and lines, creating a roadmap of my life woes and tears. I hold her hands in mine, yet no matter how tight I grasp them I can not keep her wrapwithwithin my flesh. I know she is already lost. I know, because half a century ago I too was lost to my own family.
I left home for a man that I didn't love, and I kept house for family that never cared. I raised children who were unappreciative, and gave money that was spent fruitlessly. A shared a bed with a man who thought more of a cold beer and a Sunday football game than the woman living awake next to him. Yet I never thought to leave them, to grab my bags and get on a train and go to some far corner of the country. No, I stayed "“ along with my tupperware collection, the empty suitcases, and my mother's gold rimmed glasses which I would nightly fill with bourbon. I stayed here with the dark rooms and the abandoned feelings, the loneliness that plagued me nightly long after Richard fell asleep.
I helped her prepare for this life she is willingly walkintointo. I helped her pack her bags, and listened to her mindless chattering about her new life that awaits her. I heard about his dogs, and the way he wears his glasses just so. She chirped like a newborn chicken. So hopeful. So nieve.
This morning I watched Richard hobble uneasily on the limb which is practically dead flesh as he carried her bags to the car. He closed the trunk and turned back to the house and called to me in the voice which hardly seems romantic anymore, telling me to grab his cane. This is what she is leaving for, for a life serving an unappreciative man. I muttered a prayer as she pranced out the door in her new shirt she got especially to see him today. She was too lost in the prospect of love to know the consequences of walking through the terminal and onto that plane.
At the terminal I turned to her, grasping her arm like a vise and leaned into her saying "Dear, promise to me that you will come home if... if it doesn't work out.", but she shrugged off my question with another story about him, and how wonderful he is. And now I stand here, against the darkness that surrounds my old and tiered body. The anger and regret ran through me, for being like her and giving away my life. My mind screams at me for doing nothing with my life, for being no one at all. When I die no one will read the obituaries and say "Oh I remember hearing about her.." And it screams at me for not stopping that plane which is climbing in the sky like a sheet of newsprint caught in an updraft. My wrinkled hand raises to my face to wipe away the mascara which runs down in my pain.
Has it really taken me 56 years to realize what I wed into? Did it really take me this long to see how empty and void my life has been? What is there to represent this life? What is there to represent 78 years of wasted breath? Peanut butter sandwiches, stacks of ironed clothing, the countless hours of soap operas, or the darkness which accompanies the lonely feelings that plague my existence? Or maybe it is my decrepit body which stands in this terminal beside a man I don't love, watching my granddaughter travel farther and farther away. Or maybe, it's nothing at all...