Un Momento Por Favor

The unyielding evening. The flight was cancelled due to “technical issues”, but what that was referring to was anyone’s guess. Did that mean one of the engines was malfunctioning and in dire need of repair? Did that mean the video monitors were down? Perhaps the pilot “just wasn’t feeling it” on that particular day? 

The front desk at the gate was being pushed in at all sides. Despite several travelers trying to keep a calm demeanor on the surface, brushing it off and acting like this was simply the price of admission, there was a festering unrest that was rippling throughout the vicinity at the gate. Eyes narrowed, eyeballs darting back and forth, talking on the phone, texting, trying to sort it out, but sorting it out without ringing too many alarm bells. 

Un Momento Por Favor. Un Momento Por Favor. One moment please. One moment please. 

Two tall ladies at the gate’s front desk, both seeming to convey the message: “I have been completely fed up with whatever this is before it even started.” 

One of the tall stretching ladies throwing her right arm up, index and middle finger pointing to the ceiling. “Ustedes! Todos ustedes! Siganme por el pasillo!” 

“Andele, andele!” one of the travelers shouted, and the throng shifted from pushing toward the gate to pushing toward the taller of the two gate ladies, the brunette who wasn’t playing games. She was the nucleus. 

The travelers at the gate, Spanish and English speakers alike, followed the nucleus down the long and winding hallways of the airport, through empty security checkpoints and past closed shops and kiosks. All of the travelers with signs of confusion playing on their faces, but trying hard not to show it. Signs of confusion playing on the tall gate lady’s face, a hapless confusion mainly showing underneath her flared nostrils and above the tight lines of her mouth. 

The gate lady was saying certain clipped phrases in Spanish, but even the Spanish speakers didn’t seem to understand what she was trying to get across. Whenever one of them would ask her a question, she would have these great vacant eyes that did not look at them, did not look at anything. Great barren eyes that seemed to be connected with a distant point of space and time, entirely disconnected from reality. 

At one point nearly half the group lost the nucleus and ended up waiting for a taxi service at the front of the airport, all while the nucleus and the other half of the group were actually milling around at baggage claim. One moment, please. A Good Samaritan walked over to the taxi area and alerted those travelers that they were waiting in the wrong area – “Por aqui, por aqui.” The half joining the other half and becoming whole again, a throng,with the nucleus wriggling and yearning for a swift inner implosion. 

The animals lined up into the ark two by two. “Por aqui, por aqui.” And of course, one mustn’t block the doors with incoming traffic – “Muevete mas alla de esta linea”. A few of the travelers attempting to strike up conversations with one another, but most of them just wanting to get to wherever the hell it was they were supposed to get to. 

The travelers all eventually got loaded onto buses, having a chance to wave at the airport one last time before pulling off like a gestapo ship into the hazy night. Most of the travelers, Spanish and English speakers alike, were able to check into hotel rooms and catch a few precious hours of sleep on foreign uncomfortable beds before rising in the early dawn to try it all over again at the airport. Some of the travelers were denied entry to the hotel rooms because they had the “wrong credit card.” Within the grouping of those lucky travelers, some of them tried to find vacancies in other nearby hotels and some of them just taxied back to the airport where they attempted to sleep awkwardly, like fainting pretzels, in stiff chairs, or lie like gutted fish on the cold marble floors near information desks and closed coffee shops and cantinas. 

After flights were canceled and rebooked, those English and Spanish speaking travelers kept an eye out for familiar faces on rearranged connecting flights. “Hey, I remember that face,” someone might think to themselves, looking at the same bald bespectacled man on a flight from Miami to Seattle. “Oye, recuerdo esa familia,” someone might think to themselves as they lined up into zones on a flight to Lima. Sometimes waving, sometimes politely nodding, but always with that look in the eyes communicating “Hey there, way to stay strong.” The few, the proud, the aeronautically resilient. 

There would be times, for a few of the more thoughtful and curious travelers, when they would pause the movie on their screens as they waited for the drink tray to come closer to their designated row, and in those moments they would think to themselves, “I wonder what those two tall gate ladies are up to now? Are they trying to put out more fires, while secretly (or maybe not so secretly) hating their jobs?” 

And the answer was always yes. 

There would always be a gate at an airport somewhere that had a plane with a technical issue. And at that gate, no one would want to be involved. Everyone would be fed up with it before it even started. The lodging of complaints, the rearranging of schedules, the terse words, the drainage of energy, the text messages to friends and family. It was all unique but it was all strangely ubiquitous in the same moment. 

The tall gate ladies standing at either side of the front desk, mythic guards shielding all travelers from a disorganized and sterile world. Guards nodding curtly and in a commanding voice, “Un Momento Por Favor. One moment please.”