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Some Thoughts I Had While Being Sad In An Airport

1. I do not know what they pump through the vents in airports but without fail anytime I have to sit in one for any extended period of time (which is often, because I always think security will take 2 hours and it never does) I get very sad and very nostalgic. Someone should write a poetry book about sad girls in airports because omg, you would sell 10,000 copies. Anyway. So I’m sitting at a seafood restaurant at LAX and all I can think about is how excited I am to be home but how much I love the people in my life and it’s painful that those two things can’t simultaneously be in the same place. My friendships look like a map of someone bragging about where they’ve traveled to. New York, Minnesota, Virginia, Toronto, LA, Portland, Texas, Arizona, etc. More and more I think I would be exponentially happy living commune style so long as I was surrounded by my weird, wonderful friends. We could eat dinners family style ideally at an outdoor table and always be able to be around each other. This is probably a blessing, feeling this way. There is probably a famous quote said by like, Rumi or some shit about what a blessing it is to have friends that you miss like this. I am a lucky person to have people I treasure so much that not being able to be around them at a moment’s notice makes me moody at an airport eatery.
2. For a very very very very Very™ long time, I believed that feelings were not for me. That emotions were for ugly people, as Willam Belli once said. If I’m being truly honest, I think I thought they were synonymous with weakness. That a feeling was a crack in a foundation and too many of them would result in inevitable collapse. I believed if someone knew I cared about them, or that I was in pain, or that something made me happy, those were things that could then be turned against me in some way. I was the queen of bury it down. Squash it all the way down and bury it so deep that no one can touch it, no one can see it, no one can identify the cracks.
I’m trying to forgive myself for the cracks. I’m trying to remember that if there is strength in being able to move on from your breaks, there is also some strength in allowing yourself to break in the first place.
I am trying to be more open. Because the cracks, I think, are important. I am trying to soften myself. I am trying to be…