Personal Narrative
A hum fills my ears as I lie awake, sleepless, wishing the poorly reclined seat I was unhappily seated in had contact with the earth. All I wanted to do was land. There’s only so many times you can listen to the new Panic! album before you want to throw your iPod across the overly populated aircraft you are trapped in. Next to me, the most hipster French couple I have ever laid eyes on were passed out, literally on top of each other. I looked at my watch. 2:14am in New York. Four hours down. I close my eyes for the millionth time hoping something, like sleep, would happen but it didn’t. All I could concentrate on was the vibration I felt from the plane in my feet, and the urge I had to get up and jump out.
I’m not usually terrible on flights, but then again, I don’t usually spend an entire day and a half in the airport before getting on said plane. My journey began, not that morning, but the morning before that. I was packed and ready to be shipped off to France to live with a family for 3 weeks and hopefully learn the language, along with 25 other students from my high school. Our flight was at 7 that night, so we figured leaving at 1 was more that enough time to get on a bus and make the hour long journey to Kennedy International Airport, taking into consideration the mass amount of traffic that is always present in New York City.
It wasn’t. About a half an hour into the drive to JFK, we stopped. Literally stopped and didn’t move for another 5 hours. It was kind of funny at first. My friend jane and I joked at how ridiculous it would be if we missed our flight and had to sleep in an airport that night. Hilarious. We kept ourselves entertained for a while. jane brought a deck of cards and we played Go Fish for an absurd amount of time before we were ready to explode with boredom. After 3 hours of not moving, the delusional side of everyone stared to kick in.
“jane, how long do you think we’ve been on this bus?” I asked her.
She...