eliminating time

When I got back, she was meditating. I knew she was aware of me, and I wondered if she was conflicted about having disappeared for 40 minutes.

True, we had just met on the plane. True, we may never see each other again. But we had come to the business class lounge together (I could have gone to the BA lounge, but casually joined her at Cathay Pacific instead), and there was something impolite about her having vanished without an explanation. Wasn’t there?

And now she had returned from whatever had taken priority. But by then, I had decided that I would move on, too.

“Hello,” I said, when she opened her eyes. I was packing up my laptop.

“Hey hey…” came the cheery reply.

“I’m going to get moving to my gate. It’s at the other side of the airport,” I said, trying to keep an even tone.

“Oh, right,” she said, and again, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“How was your shower?” she asked, and I liked that she remembered I had wanted to take a shower. And then she asked about the weather in London. Then she made a joke, or maybe it was me.

Anyway, twenty minutes later we were comparing 20-year projections on European society. We disagreed on how the world may rebuild itself after the Ultimate War (would it be with or without religion?). We agreed that a major conflict was possible (“likely”, she said) in our lifetime. I noticed we were whispering, but didn't have to.

By the time we ascended the escalator, her flight was 10 minutes from takeoff. She seemed calm, but I think amusement was just her form of nervousness.

I’m guessing she made her plane. But I still wonder where she went for 40 minutes of our broken destiny. And I wonder what kind of a person thinks of meditating in a crowded, buttoned up lounge, surrounded by CNN plasma screens, moving tickers of down-turned arrows, and the clinking soundtrack of gluttony and restlessness and eliminating time.