Nowhere man
I did something stupid last night.
Exhausted and frustrated as I got off a plane that was landing four hours later than scheduled, I forgot something: a garment bag with a suit in it. Now, suits are expensive, so that’s no small thing to lose, but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem is that I’m a groomsman in a wedding this weekend and that suit was the suit I was supposed to wear during the ceremony. My mistake wasn’t just a headache for me; it would affect the big day of a couple I dearly care about.
By the time I realized my suitlessness, it was too late to retrieve it from the plane. I would have to pick it up from the lost and found the following day, which wasn’t terrible since I had to be back at the airport the next day for a connecting flight (that’s another story entirely), so I slouched off to the airport hotel and put off my problems till morning.
When I returned, though, my suit was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t at the lost and found. Maybe it had remained on the plane, which was now en route to Canada (it wasn’t). Maybe it was at the gate (it wasn’t). There were explanations for where it could be, but they weren’t places I could get to and, frustratingly, they weren’t places that the explainers could get to either.
My suit, for all intents and purposes, was nowhere, swallowed by the airport, perhaps never to be seen again, perhaps to be spit up unceremoniously at some later time. For most of this time I was simply overcome by frustration and unable to think, but in my few lucid moments I realized something all the more disturbing: I was nowhere, too.
I’ve been in the same geographic location for nearly a day now, but the only place I’d really been for the past 24 hours was “in transit”. Taxis, airports, a plane, an airport shuttle, and an airport hotel. None of these are real places, destinations that people intend to go to, but they’ve been my home for the past day and, just like my suit, I’d bet I’m pretty hard to find right now.
Fortunately, things are looking up. I just got a call: My suit’s been found. Hopefully pretty soon I will be, too.
