Layover

You know how flights work. You pick a flight with a four hour layover at some airport you've never meant to visit; just to save a couple of Ks - which you plan on upgrading your hotel room with, or buying some other compensation for your overtly critical overworked mind. You never upgrade your hotel room; rather you don't do any memento shopping either. All that you manage from your vacation is that you manage to come back home. Or atleast you've done one leg of your return flight, you're dragging your feet and sixteen hand baggages and your kids are getting lost at the airport, nobody has eaten anything in seven hours (they have!); and you're sitting there in a lesser known, not exactly obscure place, wondering how much better a direct flight would have been. You start to measure, obviously you can't measure such things, you drift and get lost until someone else gets lost, or someone else craves a snack, or so on and so forth.

Four hours is easy time, you wink and it's gone. You gather up, and board the flight. You wonder if the take off would be smooth, all the other flights on this vacay have given you the free falling in space experience. And you've been training yourself not to give in to fears, rational or irrational. Surprisingly, the flight is mid take off and you haven't even realised it.

You look out. Oh my god, the night lights are so pretty. What city is this? It's his hometown, isn't it. The x before the y before the zee. You wonder if he's home. Of course not darling, he left home long ago. And it left him too. When you met him, he was a bona-fide homeless nomad. He wouldn't settle and you wouldn't budge. Then he left you. 

Today, looking down from the clouds, you wonder where his house would be. And where he went to the movies or where he played cricket. Or where he went to school. May be his parents still lived there. He moved and abandoned the country long time ago, and hasn't been heard of since - wreck of a lover that he was. You wonder if he calls his mother every day, or now and then, or has he called her now, like exactly now.

Then your mind drifts, you wonder if you got your ID back from that flight attendant, or whether you should get some shuteye. Knees are a pain, already.

So yes, in other news - the layover has turned out to be a fair enough compensation.