I never imagined that an interstate trip could be so exciting.
But when your world shrinks the way it has since the pandemic hit Australia two-and-a-bit years ago, and then slowly expands, only to contract and gradually open up yet again, the most prosaic experience attains new meaning.
And so it was with my first flight in more than two years.
There was the airport. Airports have been a mainstay of my life since I was in my mid-20s (that’s a long time); always departing and arriving, often weekly, sometimes melancholy at leaving little kids behind, other times elated or excited, and sometimes afraid of the unknown upon arrival.
I’d forgotten how it felt to be amid that mad bustle of people coming and going. The atmosphere freighted with the anticipation of love or conflict, duty maybe – or just out-and-out fun. Obligations. Reunions. Goodbyes. The air was palpable with it all on Good Friday. I’m an early-to-the-airport person (thanks Dad – although, unlike you, I don’t wear a tie when flying) so two hours before boarding to negotiate a seriously undermanned and overstretched Sydney Airport was no chore. Time for the bar and, of course, people-watching.
That woman with the New Yorker tote-bag? Between alternate gentle laughter, scowls and shakes of her head she wrote furiously on her laptop and into a Moleskine notebook. Play? Short story? Novel?
That group of young Arab men and women laughing and posing for photographs by the expansive windows, aircraft in the background, lighting up the place with their infectious happiness.
The man in the corner drinking three to everyone’s one. Alone. Brooding. Dutch courage for a showdown? Or fearful flyer? Another one of the 70,000 stories who passed through the airport that day.
I’ve never exactly been a chilled flyer. But when the plane took off I was hypervigilant and excited, thrilling in that moment of exquisite weightlessness as the wheels departed Earth, leaning across my partner towards the window to watch everything below miniaturise. I felt seven years old again. And I experienced that déjà vu sense of ambiguous possibility I’d always had, fleetingly, all those thousands of times I’d flown … until two-and-a-bit years ago.
During lockdowns I’ve been in the privileged position of being able to embrace the shrunken pandemic world. My routine revolved around my neighbourhood, my dogs, my immediate family, my kitchen and my desk. The extraction of everything extraneous (socially, professionally, recreationally) from life was at once a liberation and an incarceration. Mundanity has its own hypnotic rhythm, of course, and one thing I learned about myself during lockdown (something I’d long suspected) was how very comfortable I’d become in recent years with a minimal external – and conversely vivid internal – life. The other thing about pandemic life, of course, is that it is the ultimate enemy of the well-laid plan. Like everyone, Covid-19 had scuttled numerous holidays, birthday celebrations, day trips and get-togethers.
When, some weeks ago, we booked to fly last Friday, I never actually expected it to happen. Perhaps that’s why, with wheels-up, I felt more consumed by a moment than I have for some time. The city we visited – the last place I flew to before the pandemic and where I’ve been dozens of times – seemed, if not quite exotic, remarkably compelling.
Is it possible that the denial of so much during the pandemic lockdown (Melbourne people are the experts on such advice) had added new allure to what was formerly the prosaic. I think so. The restaurant meal, the plane ride, the hotel stay, the social occasion all now come with a joy that might previously have been a certain nonchalance or even weariness.
Last June, just weeks ahead of the long Sydney lockdown that would soon follow, a dear friend held a big birthday bash. It was no special number as big birthdays go (though it could be said that every one beginning with a “6” is momentous). But our friend wanted a party after the preceding 18 months of pandemic fear and loathing, there was a brief unlocked opportunity and, besides, he wanted to get drunk and karaoke that Beatles song about a significant birthday.
It may as well have been an Oscars after-party for the vibe and cut-loose fun that was had. The experience resonated joyfully through some of the darkest months of lockdown that followed. Notwithstanding the (increasingly hidden) economic and physical suffering, (and continuing) fear, illness and deaths that the raging pandemic still holds, it remains a bright, warm memorial light.
That’s what happens when everything old is new again, when simplicity spawns a new virtue.
So much so that, on the return flight last Sunday, I became that person who feverishly takes bad photographs of the harbour from the plane window.
