In theory, a weekend trip is the perfect vacation. Spend two nights in a different location. All you need is a small duffel bag and limited logistics to get you through the reset. Leave on Friday, come back on Sunday, fill the time in between with enough new things to come back refreshed, or at least with a slightly different perspective. You might go on a weekend trip for vacation, work, or to see family, but the effect is the same. Things have changed a bit when I come back. My usual life looks a little different.
Last weekend, I went on what was supposed to be a short trip to attend my university's graduation ceremony, but technically it flew by in the blink of an eye. I had barely been away for 48 hours, but extreme weather conditions kept me in liminal space for most of that time. Transportation — airports, landed planes, traffic jams — places where time can be difficult to read. An old friend used to call these realms of neither here nor there “zero worlds” because they feel liberated from reality, parallel to yet separate from everyday life. After the fourth lightning delay announcement, the cabin is a world apart from the one you know, with perhaps little in common: “We have to get out of here.” It is a temporary society populated by temporary citizens who probably have little in common except for one deep-seated belief.
Like other travelers, I was grumpy and impatient every time the journey became complicated, but I was also fascinated by the community and customs of Zero World and the market of Cibo Express. Each of us did not throw a tantrum over a single announcement from the captain at any time, but at the same time we looked at each other and the airline staff, as if to prove that the images of unruly people with short tempers were not on display. Competitively, I was careful to be polite to others. The passengers strapped to their seats with duct tape do not represent us, the makeshift civilization in this departure lounge.
When the graduation ceremony finally arrived, it was a lot of fun, despite some troubles. The speaker, an astronaut, showed a photo of the farm where she was born and raised. It's a place she considered home for most of her life. She then showed a picture of the Earth's edge, the glowing edge of the atmosphere, and explained that when she went into space, her home became this planet instead of a town on a map. I felt a huge change in perspective. Thinking about it makes me feel a little nauseous.
