In theory, a weekend trip is the perfect vacation. Two nights somewhere else, just a small duffel bag and limited logistics standing between you and reset. Leave on Friday, come back on Sunday, fill the times in between with all sorts of new things and return refreshed, or at least with a slightly changed perspective. You can take a weekend trip for vacation, for work, or to see family, but the effect is the same. You will be a little changed when you return. You see your daily life a little differently.
I took a short trip last weekend to attend a college graduation, and to be fair, it was quick: I was only away for 48 hours, but inclement weather kept me in the dark. nominal period of most of that period. transit — airports, plane landings, traffic jams — where the time is impossible to read. An old friend once called these realms of neither here nor there “zero worlds” because they feel untethered to reality, parallel to everyday life but separate. The flight compartment after the announcement of the fourth delay was a world apart from the world you know, a temporary society with temporary citizens who probably don’t have much in common except a common belief. profound news: We need to get out of here.
I was as cranky and impatient as the rest of my companions at each complication of our journey, but also fascinated by the community, customs, and Cibo Express marketplace of world zero. Each of us, at any given moment, is informed by the captain to avoid tantrums, but we also compete carefully to be polite to each other and to airline staff, as if determined to proves that those wild videos of temperamental passengers duct-taped to their seats do not represent us, the makeshift civilization of this departure lounge.
Graduation, which I finally arrived at, was a joyous affair despite the hiccups. The speaker, an astronaut, showed a photo of the farm where she grew up, which she called home for most of her life. She then shows a photo of the edge of the Earth, the glowing edge of the atmosphere, and describes how as she flew into space, home was no longer a town on a map but the planet hey, such a big change in perspective that I feel a little nauseous just thinking about it.
