Is it Air France pretending to be Delta or Delta pretending to be Air France...? Somehow I can't seem to remember. It's 5am and I've been up all night.
I sit at my gate eating the snacks from the previous flight and drinking overpriced coffee. The crowds of luxuriously dressed black people have disappeared and I keep company with a not-too-friendly French lady who is also apparently going to Atlanta.
A Muslim lady and I both walk circles around promising looking cylinders which seemed to be trash cans, but to no success. I sit with my pile of stuff feeling miserable. Red eyes, runny nose, and foggy brain.
How many times am I going to have to do this? Probably many, because the life I've chosen means airplanes, expensive coffee, red-eye flights and long nights.
It’s six months later and after a slightly panicked ordeal at CLT, I find myself sitting again, this time in the Dulles airport... it’s 5am again and I’m waiting to board the first of two long flights which will take me back to my husband and my new home.
We are in Ethiopia now...15 hours later the white crowds have shifted and changed to black, and I am standing out again... but I don’t care because I am almost home. It’s time to change clothes and wait for my turn at the crowded bathroom mirror.
I am so tired I can barely think straight, but then the fog in my brain begins to lift as the heat presses in, and I stubbornly and confidently press my way in and through immigration, refusing the detours that mean money and delays.
My eyes are burning from 24 hours without sleep. I squint into the brightly lit room, scanning the faces.
And then I see him and the wait is over and I’m no longer alone.
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