This time it’s Bradley International in Hartford, a much less enjoyable airport to be in for a few reasons. First of all, there aren’t many people in it to people watch, and the people that are here are grouchy because they live in Connecticut. Then there’s the fact that the airport itself is a pretty bleak place, with bland gray walls and torn up generic carpet. There are still Fourth of July decorations up, cheap translucent American flags strung out on frayed plastic ribbon, their ends curling upward from too much time in storage. The employees aren’t much more cheerful than the airport’s sad décor. It’s times like these when I see the real difference between social interaction in the South and in New England. It just feels a lot colder and less welcoming than the places I go in Charlotte.
The main reason it’s less enjoyable is because I know that I’m leaving. I know, I know, Connecticut makes people grouchy (especially my father, who vowed never to return after I graduated), but being away this weekend was something that was much needed even if it was in CT. I’m realizing now that most of the good friends I got to see while in Hartford were former teammates of mine. When I was a freshman my coach told us to look around the gym at the people we were with, that they would forever occupy a special place in our lives, above friends and roommates in a special kind of family. She was right (although I don’t think she said it that eloquently). My best friends in the world are girls I played with, sharing the pain of early morning workouts, sharing cramped bus seats on buses as we traveled, sharing sweat, tears, and laughter. It’s the kind of bond that forms because you make sacrifices for and with each other. Now, those sacrifices seem petty—trading the Welcome Back dance for a team movie night, Halloween for an early bedtime before a game, sleep for sprinting drills—but in the end those things form a connection that I don’t think I could find in other places.
But being with my boyfriend was what I really needed. There’s the whole element of lacking physical closeness that makes distance so hard, because a lot of times what people need most isn’t the comforting words or laughter from a badly made joke (although I love those moments). It’s a hand on the back of my head, or a pat on the arm, or just the proximity of his leg to mine that seems to have the most calming effect on me. And now that I’ve had that for two days, I feel like I’m right back where I started, going into withdrawal because of my isolation from those very small forms of physical contact. It makes the week of work ahead feel daunting in a way it didn’t before, because now I’m stuck readjusting once again to this huge loss of support that I had this weekend, if only for a short while.
It brings up the question of whether seeing each other makes it better or, in a weird way, harder, because it just reminds us of how much we’ll be missing once we go back to our respective homes. Of course it’s worth it to me, otherwise I wouldn’t have bought a plane ticket and shipped myself back up North, but it’s a tough place to be in once it’s over. It’s more that I leave with a feeling that it’s all very unfair, that I’m being robbed of something that I should have, a feeling of happiness and contentment that belongs to me but is being kept away in a box on a shelf that I can’t reach for an undisclosed amount of time.
It doesn’t help that in twenty minutes I’ll be getting on a flight taking me farther away, most likely while sitting next to an overweight man who’ll unbutton his shirt from the bottom to make himself more comfortable and everyone around him significantly less so.
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