It Is Good to Be a Bit Lost

Hannah lay curled up into a ball on her seat. She had kicked her shoes off, and I could see one striped sock poking out from underneath her jacket, which she was hiding behind, her face covered by the hood. I had already yelled at her about the hood; it reminded me of a man about to be hung. She had just covered her face with it anyway, and continued to seek sleep.

We were sitting in a small airplane, with only three seats in every row. Outside of the window I could see the green and red lights of the runway, as well as the blinking lights on every aircraft. A large German airplane drifted past us on the tarmac, dwarfing us the way Goliath did David. In the front of the cabin was our flight attendant, half-hidden in shadows, her pale moon face staring out at us eerily.

The entire situation felt surreal.

If I closed my eyes, I could still see myself sitting somewhere completely different from the Newark airport, suspended on the tarmac, waiting for mechanics to fix the engine and refuel our little aircraft. In my mind, I could imagine the arduous trek from Holly Grove 4 with our five suitcases, dragging them down to reception, sweating underneath my four layers of clothing. I remembered the face of our cabbie, who had helped us load each and every suitcase into the trunk, and then chatted with us on the way to the airport, asking us questions like, “Do American high schools really look like they do on T.V.?”

From the window I watched the sun rise over Belfast for the last time. Northern Ireland had made an effort to be sunny for us. The Lanyon Building glowed, Samson and Goliath stood stoically in their permanent retirement, and Belfast Castle seemed to stand straighter on Cave Hill. I traced the familiar hills with my eyes, wondering if I could see the path we had scrambled down three weeks ago, if that was the cave I had climbed into. When I had first come to Belfast, we had been on a bus, and the sky overhead had been gloomy and drizzling. Now I was sitting in the back of a taxi, and I was saying good-bye to the places I loved best.

Victoria was already somewhere over the Atlantic, flying home. Her plane had been scheduled to leave at 7.00 a.m. Hannah and I were leaving Northern Ireland at 11.10. She would get home earlier, but she would miss seeing the sun rise over the green farmland one last time. The sky was my favourite colour, a soft yellow, surrounded by peach and purple haze.

The cabbie dropped us off in front of the airport, and undercharged us out of the goodness of his heart. Then he was gone, leaving Hannah and I with five suitcases we could barely manage by ourselves.  Slowly we pulled them inside of the airport, and got in the queue to check in our bags. We were standing behind a woman who had lost a grandparent, and had flown here to be at the funeral, but lived in America. Hannah said all of the right things to her, and slowly we moved ahead in the queue. Our large suitcases cleared—mine was right on the dot, for which I was grateful—and then I checked in our second suitcase, which only came out to 62 pound. Luckily, I had 42 pound on me, and Hannah supplied the other 20, and we paid the charges cheerfully.

“We must be making everyone’s day,” Hannah said as we hurried off to Gate 22, now three suitcases less, “for being so happy.”

And we were happy. Everything was going as it should. Our airplane was on time. The airport was clean and staffed with kind, friendly people. I was in control of the situation. I was in Northern Ireland. Hannah was ecstatic. She was going home. We wandered through the airport until we found Gate 22, and there we waited. There were large windows everywhere, and it looked as if the sun had fully risen.

We got on the plane a few minutes later, and I was pleased to see that the airplane was full of Queen’s students returning home. Mehgan, the grad student Hannah and I hung out with a lot for our first few weeks at uni, was sitting a few seats ahead of us, and Katie, from anthropology, was on my left across the aisle. We were all headed home.

It was a posh airplane, so we all had little video monitors, and we all hooked into them right away. I watched Lilo & Stitch, Brave, and pieces of The Dark Knight Rises. Then Hannah and I watched Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer together, which was absolutely terrible. First off, the glasses that they were wearing marked them as different anyway, because only people who had syphilis really wore sunglasses out in public (so the vampires are walking around town with giant badges that shouted I HAVE AN STD) and then the historian in me cringed and crawled into a hole and died because none of the characters were true to their real-life bases at all. I mean, Mary was quite insane; she chased Abraham around the house with a knife once. That cute little quality was completely lacking in the movie. About the time the Civil War started I took the headphones off and started to read, because I couldn’t take anymore historical inaccuracies.

We landed in Newark about one or two there time—I think. Hannah and I got off of the plane and collected our luggage, got our passports re-stamped, and were shuttled this way and that until we dropped off our suitcases again. A wonderfully brilliant man who worked for the airport showed me a neat trick to help me balance the suitcases, and after that I had no problem at all juggling the suitcases. Unfortunately, once we’d gotten it so we could actually walk and carry the suitcases, we had to drop them off again and find our way to our gate for the next flight, which involved talking a little train-trolley-people mover-to terminal A, where we had to wait in another queue (wait, this was America, it was a line) for someone to check our passports for the third time. Hannah was very patient and resigned to all of this, but it annoyed me. Eventually we ended up on gates 20-27, which was a large circular area covered with too many people without any manners or politeness at all. I missed the Northern Irish with their hospitality and their politeness.

We waited there, watching the raining gray sky melt into the velvet blue of night. I bought a hot dog roll, hoping it would taste like the sausage rolls of Belfast, but it was too spicy, too…American. I ate it, but it did not fill me up. Hannah bought a slushie that reminded her of Psych, and when we ate we realised that our flight had switched Gates.

During the suitcase hassle, I had lost Katie without being able to say good-bye, but Mehgan had followed us, and she said that it was normal. So I went up and had my ticket checked, and luckily our flight had only been moved one gate, so we could stay where we were. I read more of I Capture the Castle, and waited.

The plane was moving.

I opened my eyes. Hannah still looked like a dead woman walking, but once we started to move she took the hood away from her face. Her eyes were glassy. We had been on the tarmac a full hour. Earlier Hannah had been annoyed with the delay, talking about how she just wanted to go home, and how she worried that her parents wouldn’t be there.

“They’ll be there,” I assured her. “Why wouldn’t they wait? I’m sure someone told them there were problems with the engine…”

When we had first started crawling towards the flight strip, our engine had shrieked in a terrible, unnatural way—“like a crying baby,” Hannah had said. Sure enough, someone else thought it wasn’t normal either, and they had checked the engine whilst leaving it running, which sounds both dangerous and wasteful. In any event, we had gotten refueled, and we were going to be home in an hour and a half.

“Are you all right?” I asked Hannah.

She shook her head, no.

I was wearing my scapular and had my rosary wrapped around my wrist. The noises had scared me, and suddenly thoughts of dying in a plane crash were very real to me—helped, no doubt, by the little bit of The Dark Knight Rises I had watched over the Atlantic, which begins with Bane in a small airplane and ends with it crashing to the forest floor below.

A thought ran through my mind: I can’t take this, put me on a plane back to Belfast, but I squelched it.  I chewed my gum forcefully (a downside to sitting next to me on a plane—I chew gum like my life depends on it, because otherwise I go deaf for hours) and once we were in the air I started to write in my journal, writing of places that I still carried in my skin. I closed my eyes again, and I could see the sun rising over Belfast. I could see the boy in the Belfast terminal with a backpack that read In Event of a Zombie Apocalypse, Follow Me, and I could still remember Katie standing behind me at the luggage carousel in Newark. My mouth still tasted of Root Beer and a hot dog and the memory of crisps that I had seen for the first time in months, Nacho Cheese Doritos and Lays Ready Salted. The memories were still present, shifting around in my mind.

The flight attendant appeared, and gave Hannah water, which she devoured greedily. I hoped that it would help. I continued to scratch in my journal in the half-light. At one point Hannah leaned forward, and I thought she was going to say something, but she only peered dazedly at the few lines of black writing on the page for a few moments, and then settled down to sleep again.

Hannah had closed the window on our side, but across the aisle I could still see the darkness. We had flown through several rainclouds, which had terrified me, as the lights at the end of the wings blinked like lightning. Now, however, there was no cloud cover. My ears started to feel fuzzy, and I knew that we were descending. I looked, and I could see what looked like water and then a strip of darkness that looked more permanent than the water, aglow with yellow city lights. I thought it looked beautiful.

“Look,” I said to Hannah, but we had turned, and she could not see it. I wondered what it was we were flying over—a great lake, a river, Detroit, another state entirely? I remembered what Hannah had said, when we saw how small our plane was—who in their right mind would go to Detroit anyway? But we were almost there, and there was no going back.

At last we landed, and I stood right away. I was tired of sitting, even though standing was probably more dangerous, because the top of my head was only maybe half an inch from the ceiling of our little aircraft. My ears were ringing.

We got off the plane and collected our carry-ons, and then emerged only a few gates down from the one that had started us on our international journey. “Does this look familiar?” I asked Hannah. “Do you remember this place?”

It was empty now. All of the shops were closed, and only a few people—probably waiting on our rinky-dink little plane—were there. I hurried Hannah through the halls, thinking to myself that everything looked smaller, as if I was dreaming about a place I had been once. We stopped off at the toilet—“Thank God,” Hannah said, “We can call it a restroom now!” and then walked towards the baggage claim. “Why is it so far away?” Hannah asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied, walking faster.

We passed a closed Hockey Town and McDonalds, and turned past a large Christmas tree. A few airport officials were goofing off in the empty spaces, joking loudly. We appeared in another empty room, the one we had dropped off our bags four months ago. Full circle, full circle, I thought. I had rained when we arrived in Belfast; it rained in Newark when we arrived, and here we are again. Life goes around and around and around…

I had lost track of where we were; I had stopped. But Hannah knew where she was going. She went to the escalators, and we went down.  What time was it? It was 9.00 in Detroit; it was 2.00 in the morning in Belfast. Was I tired? Was I giddy? What was I? Who was I?

“That person looks familiar,” Hannah said.

I looked, and at the bottom of the escalator I saw a girl in a purple sweater, a matching purple hat on her head. Her hair was long and brown and straight, and she was wearing red glasses and carrying a sign that read: WELCOME BACK REBEKAH AND HANNAH with a picture of Michigan, Carleton marked with a little black dot, and the words “Northern Ireland” scrawled in cursive in a corner.

It was Emily.

I wanted to run down the escalator, but I was trapped behind Hannah, who waited patiently for the escalator’s stairs to run its course. Once I was on level and solid ground I abandoned my suitcase and charged Emily. Over her shoulder I could see mum, smiling, and Hannah’s parents. Hannah went to say hello to her own family, and I went over to mum, shouting, “Mummy!”

“Daughter!” she answered.

Our suitcases came very promptly, and I had to run after my obnoxious pink one, and then divvy up our shared checkered bag. Hannah got her belongings, and I got mine, and then we had to say good-bye.

“Thank you for putting up with me,” Hannah said.

“Thank you for putting up with me,” I replied.

We went outside, and my dad appeared in the blue van. We got our stuff in the van and piled in, chatting and talking. Mum had been talking to flight officials and had known we would be late; they had said we left but had to go back for repairs. Soon we were barreling down the highway—what side of the road? The right, always the right. Not the left.

At home Emily had put up a green sign on the front door that welcomed me home again. “And look!” she said, “Mom made these for you!”

They were pumpkin muffins, food that was unavailable in Northern Ireland. It’s preposterous, but the things I missed most about America were food and my friends. I made myself dinner, loving my first pumpkin muffins in four months, and eating way too many Lays crisps than what was good for me. It was ten o’clock, and Dad ushered everyone off to bed, saying, “You have school tomorrow!”

I sat downstairs by myself, eating my dinner. The Christmas tree had been designed to look artistic this year. It lacked its usual hodge-podge of sentimentality that I always like, with grandmother’s sea green bauble with the missing angle, Emily’s and my childhood Christmas projects, artifacts from mum’s European travels, the nutcracker and the rocking horses I always loved. It seemed alienated from me in its different-ness. The kitchen, too, seemed empty without Patches there to greet me, asking, Where have you been? I missed you, I missed you.

I went upstairs to bed. I knew it was late—three in the morning in Belfast—but I did not feel tired. I stood in my room for a long moment, remembering what I had forgotten. I had not realised I had all of this stuff, I had forgotten the sentiment behind this or that item, I had forgotten to remember this or that. Memories started to come back to me; facets of myself that I had ignored since high school, or had not used since I had crossed the ocean. I used to love Japan, I realised with a start, and I collect movie stubs, and look at all of the books…I never realised I had this many. And I have a violin and a clarinet and a pitiful excuse for a guitar and I collect rocks—and why do I feel lost in my own room?

I unpacked Patrick and Porter and put them on the chair, and then I climbed into bed. My cover felt cold and different, and I was surprised at how used I’ve gotten to my duvet, now in Rebekah’s room in Belfast. There were posters on the wall, but I could not remember what they were, and it was too dark to see them.

Somehow I fell asleep, and the next thing I knew it was morning; my parents were waking up to start their days. I got up with Emily at six, and sat with them until mum left for school and so did Emmy, and then I went up into my room and finished writing in my diary, all of the things I had not had time to write. I thought about posting on my blog, but I felt too unsettled to do that. Instead I wrapped Christmas presents and went to the public library, suprising myself by remembering how to drive, and picking Emily up at school. Some of the teachers recognised me, Mr. Pyle and Mrs. Poth primarily, but others did not; and some it took a few seconds. Mrs. Poth said I looked like a world traveller, and I wondered if I had changed very much.

Later I talked to mum about my day, and said that the reason I was getting through was I did things out of habit. This is always how it is done, even if I had forgotten to think about it. Everything was muscle memory, and so I wasn’t sure if I would get culture shock, as Emily was predicting. How could I get culture shock, if my body remembered what it had always done?

“It’ll be easier to get used to things,” she said wisely, “Because you’re not having to figure out a whole new culture. You’ll get over your jet lag soon.”

This reminded me of one of the last things Ciaran Carson, my Creative Writing professor, said to my class. “To be lost,” he said, with that faraway look which means he is voicing his thoughts out loud, that he has almost forgotten that we are there, “is an experience. To know exactly where you are is no fun. You should always be a bit lost.” When he said it, all I could think of was the Tolkien poem, All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.

And I sat at the kitchen table, staring down at the tablecloth, and I thought, I’m just a little bit too found for my own good.

But I knew that found feeling wouldn’t last for long. In two and a half weeks, I’m going back to Madonna—and I have plans for adventures and good craic there for the next year and a half. And afterwards? Well…the whole world is waiting!  And I plan to get thoroughly lost.