Funny and Interesting Airport Stories That Strangers Share : Human tapestry

Madrid January 21st- A small dose of jet lag

Time and place… it seems at times to escape me. i am here in body but I still am adjusting to the time zone. Have all the parts I left behind caught up with me?
I take things day by day. I am always amazed at the strangers I meet along the way of my journeys. There was the humble man who was on the plane with me to Texas who wanted to talk incessantly when I wished to sleep. tThere was the two women travelling from Costa Rica. The Bolivian temptress who sat with me on the train station speaking of her boyfriend , her cousin’s slutty ways and her adventures in Malaga. In certain conditions, humans tell me their stories and they open up like rivers. Sure, sometimes we exchange numbers but I doubt if I will ever see them again. But yet, in that small dose of intimacy two souls connect… I wonder if the next world I will recognize them.
There is the girl who I met on the station in Madrid, who told me she had no money and her mother had died and she had been forced to send her daughter back home… who spoke in scared hushed tones , tiny and young and frail. There is the punk boy on the bus ride in Amherst on my way back to university who took out a knife and told me he was running from the cops and then proceeded to smoke pot in the bus bathroom. There is the woman who did not know how to write when I was 14 and asked me to write her immigration form on the way to the UNited States for the first time. The two women from Argentina, fresh off the financial collapse in 2001 who had taken out all their money in time to go on a vacation to Cuba. The salvadorean loud texan who rambled on about the government. The Ukranian mime who lived in London who was stuck with me in the airport in Milan… The 70 year old man who sat with me on the trip home in Texas this month who sadly spoke of his widowed wife and his trips to Spain so many years ago… Or the Texan couple in the hotel in December who told me that with her first husband she was a hot red headed who would get pinched in the buttocks when she went to London… the mothers in the coffee shop in Chertsey whose husband is a gaffe for famous television films. And yet, after our conversations, we say ” Have a nice trip, nice speaking to you” And there they are gone from my life, disappearing into the cosmos of a time where I do not know them… to a life I cannot cross.
And I want to be in their kitchens, I want to see their stories. I want to know why the girl with the wilted flowers and the broken pantyhose is crying… I sit in the subways and see the couples…some intimate, some just starting out, some old and familiar, others with babies on their laps…
I love their stories, their humanity…the ability to speak forth like deep embracing oceans, small drops of spectacular freedom.
And yes, it might mean I sometimes do not live my life. My writer’s mind is always in other thoughts. But I would never ever change this.

Finding Home

Home is where the heart is….
But what if your heart is scattered in a thousand directions?

I had planned on moving somewhere but it didn’t work out. I have to now start from scratch and pick up the pieces. Starting from 0 ad thinking : Now what? What I should be doing?
” Maryam , the problem is you are always thinking of the next trip, of the next move forward”>>…” I never saw this as a problem. I always wanted to discover, to go places, to find new adventures
I remember once when I was 14 I wrote in this very old computer in the Bahai Centre, it was about finding being old and being charged to the chains of routine…and feeling like I was slowly dying.
Now, this is more than melodramatic…but what the heck makes me feel so scared about settling down?
How can I possibly make a life if I don’t think about it?
I speak with other third culture kids, and they all have the same dilemma, it’s like the idea of moving is more normal than staying put…the idea of a suitcase seems more sane than buying furniture. It’s scary but true.
So now, I have to pick a place. Stick with it and when things get tough not try to bolt somewhere else.
That’s the hard part.
Let’s stay tuned and see if it works.
I always thought I would settle down when i get married but maybe it’s not that simple.