The weekend trip is, in theory, the perfect getaway. Two nights somewhere else, just a small duffel bag and limited logistics between you and a restart. Leave on Friday, return on Sunday, fill the intervening hours with enough news, and return refreshed, or at least with a slightly altered perspective. You could take a weekend trip for vacation, work, or to see family, but the effect is the same. You are a little changed when you return. You see your usual life a little differently.
Last weekend I took what was supposed to be a quick trip to attend a college graduation, and it was, strictly speaking, quick: I was barely gone for 48 hours, but the extreme weather left me isolated for most of those hours in the liminal spaces of Transit (airports, planes on the ground, traffic jams) where time loses legibility. An old friend used to call these neither-here-nor-there realms “world zero” because of the way they feel unmoored from reality, parallel to daily life but separate. The flight deck after the announcement of a fourth lightning delay is a world separate from the one you know, a temporary society populated by temporary citizens who may not have much in common except a deeply held belief: We have to get out of here.
I was as grumpy and impatient as the rest of my traveling companions at every complication of our travels, but also fascinated by the communities, customs, and Cibo Express markets of world zero. Each of us was, at one point, one captain’s announcement away from a tantrum, but we were also competitively careful to be courteous to each other and to the airline staff, as if determined to prove that those wild videos short-tempered The passengers tied with duct tape to their seats did not represent us, the improvised civilization of this departure lounge.
Graduation, when I finally arrived, was a joyous affair despite the failures. The speaker, an astronaut, showed a photo of the farm where she grew up, the place she called home for much of her life. She then showed a photograph of Earth’s limb, the bright edge of the atmosphere, and described how, when she went to space, her home was no longer a city on a map but this planet, such a massive shift in perspective. that I felt a little dizzy looking at it.