I had gotten to the airport more than on time, correctly anticipating delays from the weather, and I was laying it on the line in a bar themed for rock and roll. That’s when I struck up conversation with the two women to my left. Both wore boots. The one further away was entirely immune to any pull I may have been exerting. She was off playing games on her phone in a minute. The other one leaned toward me and started telling me about how photographs were more mystical than people thought. “I think they are very very mystical,” I said. “Are they even more mystical than that?” Her eyes pulsed a silent laugh. This was our first conversation, and it lasted a while before a voice crackled onto the loudspeaker that my flight was cancelled. Her flight, too, as it turned out. “Aw, garbage,” she said, leaning back in her boots. It was her who had the bright idea of getting a hotel room together. Sleep was out of the question because I didn’t want to risk losing what I was seeing. Later on down the line she told me I had gotten everything about her wrong. She wasn’t the princess of a fictitious Himalayan kingdom, half-shrouded in clouds half the year. She wasn’t the inventor of new technology that would allow people to transport first themselves and then, a few seconds later, their clothes. She wasn’t able to read my mind or anyone else’s. She was tall, yes, I was right about that, and depended greatly on the power of the silent laugh, and she understood some things perfectly and other things not at all and was sedulous about converting the latter to the former. But the rest was just my fantasy. She left me with a snapshot that proved she had not aged a day even if her boots had aged thousands. I thumbed the corner of the photograph. It was even more mystical than I thought.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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