The Glass

We all heard it.

A shriek so loud everyone near me turned.

"Papiii!!!"

What I saw first was a blob of humanity. A mass of bodies standing, arms wrapped around each other so tightly there seemed no space for breathing. A little boy (maybe a grandson) hanging on to a leg.

Slowly the mass came apart. Two young ladies, tears in their eyes. A slightly older one, maybe his wife, maybe an older daughter. I could not tell. His beautiful brown skin so firm he could be 40 or 70 years old. I could not tell.

Someone handed him a phone. On the screen, his son from a hospital bed.

After a few seconds, they embraced again. As if not wanting the moment to pass.

I was there once.

The airport was smaller then. A couple of departure gates. You walked on the tarmac back then. Everyone who called themselves my friends was there to send me off. My siblings. My mother. My father. One friend went to the exchange and brought back $22 dollars. That's what I carried in my pocket when I landed at JFK.

But what I remember most was the glass.

The transparent wall between me and my parents. We looked at each other without saying a word, uncertain of what the future held. For me. For all of us.

My father was ugly crying. My mother stoic, but crying too. Hands against the glass, as if wanting to hold on forever.

I walked past them, made a turn, and walked onto the tarmac. I didn't look back. I could barely look at them. My parents and their fears and their pride all melting into one. I don't know what I would have done if I did.

It took me nearly a year to speak to them again.

What held us together in that silence was a single handwritten letter. Second-grade penmanship. Hands that had lost their fingerprints to the factory. I could feel my mother reaching across an ocean with what little she had.

I still have that letter. Not for what it said. For the courage it must have taken her to write past what she knew she could not say. And still, she did.

Standing in that airport watching a stranger receive his shriek, I understood something I hadn't let myself feel in a long time.

I never got mine.

We cross our thresholds alone. We walk onto the tarmac and we don't look back because looking back might undo us. We tell ourselves that's strength. And perhaps it is.

But somewhere, with hands that had given their fingerprints to a candy factory, with a second-grade education and an ocean between us, someone who loved us was writing anyway.

Because love is often somebody writing past their fear, past their limits, past the point of their own competence. And reaching anyway.

If my parents only knew what awaited me, they would have cut through the glass.

Next week, letter 52.