a blue typewriter
My bags were embarrassingly overweight. I ran through Newark airport praying out of breath trying to get to my connecting flight to SFO. The customs line took far longer than expected: my welcome “home” to America after 4 years living in Paris was the grey concrete sky scraper skyline of New York and the cold response from the Immigration officier telling me “you won’t make your flight”. I responded with an optimistic “My name is Hope and I believe in miracles!”.
Lines grew longer at security with English speakers all around me for the first time in months. TSA security stopped my nearly exploding backpack for search… I had 10 minutes until the gate closed. “It’s a typewriter…” I laughed trying to lighten the air with a sweaty brow and attempting to unpack the 3 cameras and Olivetti Lettra Blue machine while slipping on my boots. The mother next to me was being confiscated of baby formula and apple sauce. The TSA officer raised his eyebrows at me and didn’t seem to mind my pounding heart. Seconds in eternity. Throwing it all into the bag I began the sprint work out to gate C94 as a golf cart turned the corner. I stopped and pleaded with the driver to take me as far as he could. The other passenger’s flight was in 4 minutes to Dallas, we exchanged nervous laughs as I hopped into the cart and flew through the terminal, thankful for a golf cart angel willing to help.
I arrived out of breath to my gate: “You must be Ms. Curran?”
“Yes. I need to get home!”
The plane was full of masked passengers watching me struggle to lift the overweight backpack into overhead compartments. I settled down into my window seat overwhelmed. What am I doing? Where am I going? What led me to move my life across and ocean during pandemic and settle into unknown? Will there be poetry on this side of things for me?
Watching from the window only 300 miles to SFO, I realised the clouds below me were smoke. Wildfires raged below as I flew over reflecting on blue sky and the gift of horizon lines. So many homes lost, so many lives displaced and a country sick with disease. Not just COVID-19, but a disease of an American dream twisted into greed and consumerism, fear and ignorance. This is not the America I left four years ago. I hold a blue leathery passport with a golden eagle printed on in my hands full of stamps and stories that have opened my mind and heart to a world beyond these borders. A passport that I once thought gave me privilege and power. I am a foreigner to this world belonging to the liminal space of in-between, where airplane contour lines scrape eternity.
I arrived at golden hour, the smoke in the Bay Area cleared by miracle and a pinkish Californian light welcomed me gently onto the runway. I was greeted at arrivals by my beloved Peter after 6 months of distance… giddy with love and jet lag mixed all together.
The destination is always love.
Beyond the light chasing and whimsy of Paris, there is hard work to be doing in with words here in America. I brought my overweight typewriter back to cover these next months of turbulence, truth and trails.
The blue typewriter sits on the wooden chair in my yellow childhood bedroom now. She is ready for some serious poetry. Here I am, praying to be present. I suppose that’s why poems exist. To be both here and there.
These are the poems written as bookends from the last poem in Paris to the first in California.
photos by Marissa Wu
