Flight 92

I came here for the same reasons everyone does, I suppose.

I came for the beer, of course, Guinness in particular.  I came here for the food, most of it fried.  I came for the music, for the song.  I came here for the green landscapes you see on postcards or during Discovery Channel specials.  I came for the castles and the towers and the crosses.  I came for the cathedrals and for change.  I came to runaway, to discover--to find everything I needed.

My personal list of needs is far too long to write, and to be quite honest, too vague and unknown for even me to understand.  While I know that what we need and what we want are usually two very different things, I came here hoping that somehow, they'd become the same.  

After boarding the plane in Chicago, the Irish gentleman sitting next to me told me one thing I needed in particular: gum.

"I'm sorry?" I asked.  

"Gum," he said.  "So your ears won't pop when we take off."  

After taking him up on the offer, we talked very plainly about where we were from, what we did, where we had been before, and why we were going to Ireland.  Eoghan, as he was called, was going home, to Cork, Ireland, after interning in Washington D.C. for his last year of medical school.  For some reason, I remembered a professor saying that two of the greatest stories ever told, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were still fresh and relevant to this day because each deals with the most timeless theme ever--the longing for home.  

Eoghan seemed pretty desensitized to endless treks across the globe.  While it was my first time traveling overseas, Eoghan had been doing it for years.  Although I was staring out the window, waiting for the plane to take off with the same anticipation that a pre-teen waits for a girl to take off her shirt, Eoghan was busy getting comfortable, trying to remember exactly what airport he was in.  I realized that my trip, no matter how grand in scale to me, must seem pretty insignificant to most people.  And yet for seven straight hours, while coasting above Chicago, Michigan, Canada, the Atlantic Ocean, and then finally, Ireland, I was nothing but smiles.  

Eoghan mentioned that he had had a birthday recently, his 25th.  He asked how old I was, and I told him I'd just turned 21 a few months ago.  He started laughing right away.  When I asked him what was funny, he said, "Oh nothing.  You're just going to have one hell of a time in Dublin."  

I smiled and stared out the window some more, though I could see nothing but the blackness of the sky mixing with the blackness of the Atlantic below.  The only light in all that darkness, a white one at the end of the wing outside my window.  I looked at it, hoped that Eoghan was more right than he knew, and slid the window shut.