and you live a good life. It was over for him but not for Bedri.
Five airports from here to Somaliland. Dau’ud told Bedri, you will pass through five airports. Each one a passageway to how life is supposed to be lived. In the first airport, Pearson, you get rid of all the things you are living. You remember but you can forget it because you must leave. You are sad, you think you don’t want to go, because of the people you leave behind. You are anxious. You want to hold on. The left side of your chest is raw with this, maybe. Yet you are not so sad because you are a little excited for the future. You escape into that fact. You must do this, you must. You are being made to leave. In theairplane you already feel a little far away from yourself. You are only yourself because you know that you are yourself. In the second airport, you are a small book with a coat of arms at the wicket before a guard. You are a photograph and a hand under a glass window. He looks at you. He does not recognise you—not the you you know, nor the you that you are leaving behind. He, the guard, is looking at the new you he makes with his stamp. You see your self in his eyes now. After you pass him you are even less the self you know you are. In this second airport—it could be Frankfurt or London; it might be Paris—you get rid of the other half of what you were living. After all, you are only a passenger, you have the portable body of a passenger: it only holds what it can carry. In the third airport, Abu Dhabi or Dubai, you remember nothing. Falling asleep, waking up on a bench, listening for your flight, you are suddenly blissful. You feel free. All the things you were worried about in the first airport, the friends you left, the events, the work undone, all this is irrelevant. They have gone away. You are in the middle of time. You can do nothing about old friends, they don’t matter. The thought occurs to you in this airport that all the important happenings you had planned, all the anxieties you experienced living in your life before the firstairport, it’s good that all this does not exist. You need no longer exist in that life. It is going on, without you. You get some water now, you eat something, you hear your flight called. In the fourth airport at Addis, your eyes are open, your ears are open; you smell the world. You can change your clothes, free your legs, you can melt into a new life. You take out a phone from your pocket, you do not recognise it. It is your old phone with numbers from your life before. Is there someone you would call there? No. So you throw the phone away and you join the new ways of the people entering this life: how easy it is to forget, you say to yourself. You laugh. Hargeisa is the fifth airport. It is raining when you arrive there. There’s an earthy smell in the air, the smell of cool rain on the hot ground. The rain is not heavy. You breathe in the open world before you. Your bag of clothing and all that you thought you needed seem weighty. You’re tempted to leave the bag but you are vaguely curious to see what the other person who was you some hours, perhaps a day and a half ago, has in that bag. You’re sure you have no use for anything in there except perhaps a toothbrush and that you can buy. Here is your new life. You know no one and no one knows you. You will make no mistakes here and all past mistakes are erased. You begin.
When you return, if you return, you never return the same. And where you return to is not the same.
He is my boy, Da’uud thinks, but he has no imagination. Bedri returned from the African continent and slid right back into his bad habits. He was new for a while, full of all he had seen and learned from the five airports, but after only a few months, the city seeped into him once more. He became friends with that boy again.
Lake Shore Boulevard stretches in front of the taxi. The dispatcher has been calling him. He hasn’t had a fare since the woman. He’s just driven
Five airports from here to Somaliland. Dau’ud told Bedri, you will pass through five airports. Each one a passageway to how life is supposed to be lived. In the first airport, Pearson, you get rid of all the things you are living. You remember but you can forget it because you must leave. You are sad, you think you don’t want to go, because of the people you leave behind. You are anxious. You want to hold on. The left side of your chest is raw with this, maybe. Yet you are not so sad because you are a little excited for the future. You escape into that fact. You must do this, you must. You are being made to leave. In theairplane you already feel a little far away from yourself. You are only yourself because you know that you are yourself. In the second airport, you are a small book with a coat of arms at the wicket before a guard. You are a photograph and a hand under a glass window. He looks at you. He does not recognise you—not the you you know, nor the you that you are leaving behind. He, the guard, is looking at the new you he makes with his stamp. You see your self in his eyes now. After you pass him you are even less the self you know you are. In this second airport—it could be Frankfurt or London; it might be Paris—you get rid of the other half of what you were living. After all, you are only a passenger, you have the portable body of a passenger: it only holds what it can carry. In the third airport, Abu Dhabi or Dubai, you remember nothing. Falling asleep, waking up on a bench, listening for your flight, you are suddenly blissful. You feel free. All the things you were worried about in the first airport, the friends you left, the events, the work undone, all this is irrelevant. They have gone away. You are in the middle of time. You can do nothing about old friends, they don’t matter. The thought occurs to you in this airport that all the important happenings you had planned, all the anxieties you experienced living in your life before the firstairport, it’s good that all this does not exist. You need no longer exist in that life. It is going on, without you. You get some water now, you eat something, you hear your flight called. In the fourth airport at Addis, your eyes are open, your ears are open; you smell the world. You can change your clothes, free your legs, you can melt into a new life. You take out a phone from your pocket, you do not recognise it. It is your old phone with numbers from your life before. Is there someone you would call there? No. So you throw the phone away and you join the new ways of the people entering this life: how easy it is to forget, you say to yourself. You laugh. Hargeisa is the fifth airport. It is raining when you arrive there. There’s an earthy smell in the air, the smell of cool rain on the hot ground. The rain is not heavy. You breathe in the open world before you. Your bag of clothing and all that you thought you needed seem weighty. You’re tempted to leave the bag but you are vaguely curious to see what the other person who was you some hours, perhaps a day and a half ago, has in that bag. You’re sure you have no use for anything in there except perhaps a toothbrush and that you can buy. Here is your new life. You know no one and no one knows you. You will make no mistakes here and all past mistakes are erased. You begin.
When you return, if you return, you never return the same. And where you return to is not the same.
He is my boy, Da’uud thinks, but he has no imagination. Bedri returned from the African continent and slid right back into his bad habits. He was new for a while, full of all he had seen and learned from the five airports, but after only a few months, the city seeped into him once more. He became friends with that boy again.
Lake Shore Boulevard stretches in front of the taxi. The dispatcher has been calling him. He hasn’t had a fare since the woman. He’s just driven
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