ANOTHER SHORT STORY!
Portrait of an encounter
Airports
are strange places to meet. So many so different people run around there, that
it is almost impossible not to discover anything that one would find somehow worthy
of note, whether it be exotic dresses, dangerously large hard-shell cases,
extraordinarily loud tirades in strange languages, or other little pieces that
make up the large creature an airport is, which make it the exceptional place
it is. Among these many jigsaw puzzle pieces there are light and dark ones,
patterned, plain, large and small and dozens of others, and once I found one
that just got out of line; how, this I cannot explain myself; one that had the
charisma of a riddle and that immediately stroke my eye- his face.
Actually,
he was dressed completely ordinarily: dark jeans, dark shirt and dark jacket. Dark
brown, tousled hair, dark eyes, like coffee without milk. Dark, I can not
describe it differently, was the effect his appearance had on me, and maybe
that was the reason why I looked over to him so conspicuously inconspicuous for
such a long time.
The first
few minutes, in which this young man caught my eyes like a magnet, I thought
feverishly, what could be the reason, for next to him there was a big African
family in their best holiday mood waiting for their airline tickets and had
just started to sing a happy song. It was probably his serious facial
expression. No, it was this concentrated gaze towards nowhere, the look in his
eyes that left no doubt that the thoughts in his head were not of this world.
He stood
upright in the queue, and seemed in some way so unreal that I got goose bumps
everywhere.
Do you
know those movies where phantoms wander around unnoticed and unseen by humans?
As I looked at him now, this young man, I had the feeling he was as a ghost and
no one else could notice him. A fantastic and very uncomfortable thought; I
looked carefully at all the people around us.
But
indeed, I found that actually not a single pair of eyes fixed him in this way
as mine, actually, no one was looking at him, no one at all. The African family was just singing too excitedly, that had to be the reason. Just like some people are
simply not able to stop snacking out of biscuit tins, once they have started, I
could not stop to look at him furtively. He didn’t notice it, fortunately- he
did not move at all. He had a beautiful face with high cheekbones and a
finely-cut nose.
"Your turn! Lord God, where are you with your
thoughts? Already on vacation? ", someone said behind me, so stridently
that I winced. An "I’m on it,” muttered I moved forward and laid my papers
on the table and my bag on the scales for hand luggage, I did it clumsily,
because I always looked around for my phantom man, for some reason I had fear
he would just disappear. The woman behind me had snapped at me again. "Can
you ever stay on task? You are done! "This time I allowed myself to tell
her that it was not my problem if she had ants in her pants, and went away to stow
away my ticket and my papers. Then I looked back to the queue next to me-he was
no longer there, the charismatic stranger. I looked in all directions, but he
wasn't to be seen anywhere. That made me a bit puzzled, it had been many other peoples’ turn before him- how
could he have been ready faster than me? I was a little disappointed, why, I
did not know. Basically, I would have only been able to stare at him a few
minutes longer, no more. Then he would have been gone, in a plane, I in another
one, and both on the road, possibly in opposite directions. This idea was
brutal, I had had in mind to draw him, to try to capture that on paper what I
had seen. How should this work without a picture that I could save in my mind
for goodbye? A feeling like a missed train or an unfinished exam turned in; I
set myself sullenly in motion to kill some of the time until departure,
with a magazine and maybe a cup of coffee, it was still much too early in the
morning.
Of
course, the coffee shop was full to overflowing, a mob of over a dozen people
cavorted in the too-small shop, rustled with bakery bags and newspapers, and
tripped over dogs and suitcases of the other and it took just awfully long
until the waiters handed the coffees, cappuccinos and Lattes over the counter,
which didn’t particularly improve my mood in that moment. I could not help recalling
an image of this face in my mind, or at least trying. What exactly attracted me
so much it seemed like a spell? I was not sure, I just saw these eyes in front
of me, they partook something of the deep sea, the kind of depth, where only
these creepy-looking fish live, with glowing tentacles, where there reign
silence, darkness and high pressure.
"Uh ... Excuse me? What do you want to
order? "Damn, I missed out again that I was next on line. Incredible, what
effect a five-minute sight could have on me, hopefully I was not the only
person who reacted like this sometimes; whose fantasy and imagination painted such
strange ornaments around ordinary things. It could
also just be a song that made me fall in such daydreams, or a movie character, or a book, or a
landscape, or a stay in a city whose atmosphere sparked something in me. Afterwards
I could be totally incapacitated for hours- so much for my reaction ability,
communication skills or simply for my mind. Just like now. I ordered a
cappuccino and watched out for a free table; like all the others in the queue,
I had no desire to drink while standing or waiting on a bench in the airport
building.
A tiny table at the display case was still free, and as soon as I held the paper cup in my hand,
I hurried towards it, causing a murmur from the other people waiting- they had
all hoped to get there. Very well, I had noticed this grumbling, which meant I
probably slowly came around. Nevertheless, I took my sketch pad out when I had
set myself and made a feeble attempt to
draw the stranger I saw earlier, but I just couldn’t reproduce an overall
picture.
Something
was always wrong; either the contour of the face or the neck was too long or too
short, or anything else wrong with the proportions, or whatever-I just didn’t
know it so well, myself. So I sat for like a quarter of an hour, deepened in
restless scribbling, again erasing and pulling out of sheets, as I was asked,
in English: "Excuse me, is the place still available? Everything else is
already occupied." I lifted my head and winced. He was standing in front
me, and the deep- sea eyes looked at me quizzically. "Uh," I
stammered, "certainly, yes, please sit down..." He sat down and
looked me over, and I pulled out the pencil. This time the picture would get
finished.
it's all about
dreams
.JPG)
