The Girl At Terminal 63

She has cowboy boots on. That’s the first thing I notice about her; that and the fact that the boots don’t really go with everything else that she’s wearing. But yet, they sort of do. She has on a peach pink dress which stops just short of the top of the cowboy boots when she’s seated, which is how she is when I first see her. The dress is covered sparingly with an open pattern of tiny little flowers. White opalescent buttons the size of dimes run down the middle of the front of her dress stopping at a braided cloth belt with leather on its ends where it buckles. It’s not a belt, in the true sense, but part of the dress. The large airport window behind her reveals a silhouette of the shape of her legs when she shifts positions to refold herself into a new posture.

She is pretty, in a plain way. Her shoulder-length light brown hair looks well taken care of but it’s cut simply, devoid of layering or other fancy salon trickery, and frames her face in an unpresuming way. I imagine her as the daughter of a rancher in Oklahoma, a living breathing piece of modern Americana. I can practically see her kicking up dust with her worn cowboy boots as she walks across some ambiguous dry prairie, the wind tugging at the hem of her thin dress.

She twirls strands of her hair between her fingers with one hand and she holds a cell phone, almost invisible beneath the hair that has fallen over it, to her ear with the other, speaking a few words occasionally but mostly listening. Her arms are pulled in tight to her body and she leans forward, as though she is trying to find the optimal position in which to fold her thin body in on itself. I wonder what her relationship to the voice in the phone is.