Passport
It feels like the mother of all hot flashes - nausea, heart racing, stomach turning, extremities shaking. And the heat. Oh god, that heat that rises through me from the floor where I’m seated with my carryon between my legs, amid our luggage in Pearson’s Air Canada check-in line.
“Shit, Jack, they must be here. I know they’re here.” My voice wavers, my eyes are filling, and I suppress adrenalin-propelled bile. I push my humidity-frizzled grey bangs from my eyes with my left forearm while my right hand rifles through my things, focused on the task at hand - finding our passports. I’m also well into imagining dual horrors: missing our flight and never hearing the end of this.
Goddamn hubris. I think back to just an hour ago, as our taxi pulled up in front of our house.
“Got your passports?” Shelina asked brightly and rhetorically. My colleague has agreed to dog-sit at our house while we’re away.
“Ha! You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I responded. She and I laughed at the absurdity of the question. I patted the outside of my cosmetic bag. The cleansers and moisturizers I travel with now swim around in compartments designed for pre-911 times. For a decade, the outside pocket of this bag held travel docs for one on my many solo trips. More recently, it holds two passports, boarding passes, and ground transfer info.
I didn’t even check. They were there.
There are people who always forget things like Jack; there are people who occasionally forget things; there are people who rarely forget things; and there’s me. Shelina knows it, Jack knows it, and I know it. Responsibility for passports, tickets, and anything else of importance is always mine. Jack floats along, worrying about whether he has space in his carry-on for the cartons of cigarettes and bottles of gin he’ll buy at the duty free, and whether he has enough underpants for the trip. And frankly, I’ve packed a few extras for him because I’m not confident he got the number of days right.
Yet here I am, sprawled on the floor rifling through 100 ml cosmetic minis, Sudoku, extra underwear and nightgown, medications, bandaids, novels, and a book on Ireland. Where in hell are they?
“Do you remember where you last had them?” Jack asks gently, using a line I’ve oft used on him. He puts a hand on my shoulder, intending to soothe, to make me know we’re in this together.
“Don’t touch me!” In our three years together, he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of my mercurial moods or the impact of the darker ones on my civility. “And no, I don’t fucking remember where I last had them! I had them when I put them in this carryon, obviously. Why did you take them out?”
He looks down at me and starts laughing. Everything’s rising now - ire, bile, temper, temperature. What is not rising is any bright idea about where they are. I decide to take a moment to breath inspired by a mindfulness program I once took to try to manage my tendency to overreact. I think back to the night before and I remember.
“Jack, I have a good idea. With Shelina here, she can be a resource if we lose our passports. That new printer has a copier, right?” I have my own black and white laser jet in my office upstairs but Jack’s the king of tech and the basement is full of printers, laptops, and phones.
“Sure. Give them to me and I’ll copy them,” he replied, descending to his smoking cave/office.
“No way. I don’t trust you’ll bring them back. I’ll come with you.” We went down together. I remember making the copies, putting them in plastic covers, and leaving them on the dining room table, with some other important documents Shelina might need about our trip, our house, or our pets.
“Shit, Jack, they’re on the copier!” I gather up my possessions and stuff them into my bag. “I’ll call Shelina to bring them. Thank god we got here early and we live close to the airport!”
Twenty minutes later, Shelina’s cab pulls up at the designated smoking area outside the departure level. It’s where I’ve been cooling down physically and emotionally and Jack’s been filling his cells with nicotine for the trans-Atlantic flight ahead. It’s not unusual for us to be here - this is always our last stop after the baggage is dropped, and before we go through security. It’s unusual for us to be here without boarding passes though. And I hate it. Shelina, too polite to comment, wordlessly hands me the passports through the cab window. I pass her cash for the cab, and she continues back to our house. Waving. Not laughing. I appreciate that about her.
Twenty minutes later again, we’re sitting with two beers on the table between us at the gate, cheers-ing, excited to be once again in vacation mode. Jack’s boarding card and passport are half hanging out his pocket. In the last hour, there’s been a shift in control and I have lost the power to comment.
***
That’s the kind of scene I’d like to forget, but not so. For the remaining years of our relationship, each time I questioned Jack’s ability to organize anything, he grinned and said: “I have one word for you.” He didn’t even have to say “passport” after awhile.
