When I attempt to recollect my memories from my journey to France, the memories of Paris pop out vividly: winding streets down to a small corner cafe; the crisp morning air as sunlight parted through grey clouds; the soft footfalls on the cobblestone walkways around me at night as phototaxis-infected insects flitted towards the streetlights.
Yet the journey to this destination? Nothing registers. Just the vague, quiet sensation of going through the motions and the creeping awareness that I was slowly being hollowed out as I moved through the airport’s fluorescent hallways as its mechanical heart pumped throughout the entire complex. The electric blood cells pumped from its automon heart to the whirring escalators. The wailing air conditioners pumped recycled air through the halls. And animated, synthetic homunculi attempting to capture the human smile stared directly at me.
Faces stretched into perma-smiles just shy of the uncanny, eyes blinking a millisecond too slowly, customer service dialects designed to stimulate warmth without the risk of friction between a potential customer and their product. I knew they were real people. Of course I did. Yet inside that place, they may as well have been projections, trapped in the same purgatory loop as I was.
I wandered through the terminals not as a traveler, but as a carrier. A carrier of an insidious parasite that rooted itself just beneath my skin, enough for me to become aware of its presence yet powerless to stop it. It didn’t screech out with a blood curdling scream and it didn’t force itself upon me. It silently slipped in between the droning announcements and slowly fed upon me as flies would upon a carcass. The black sludge swam in veins and multiplied slowly and silently until it was too late.
I began to call it the Parasite Void. A parasite that does not absorb nutrients or devour flesh, but slowly gnaws on your will. It numbs and paralyzes your senses just enough to see as it slowly peels back the layers of your interiority. An absence that fed and thrived in the transient liminality of the airport. As its toxins pumped through my veins, I became its perfect host: a traveler who was nowhere, becoming no one, and who was waiting for a destination that kept slipping just beyond the gate.
By the time I reached my connecting terminal, I had forgotten why I was travelling at all. Not the logistics: I held my passport and itinerary with a deathgrip, and I knew my gate and boarding group number as well as my own birthday. Yet the why evaded me. The impetus. The anticipation. The excitement. It was all becoming sanded down to fit the mold of pure function.
The Parasite Void didn’t demand my obedience. It merely lulled me into forgetting that there was anything to resist. Its function worked flawlessly. I did not scream. I did not thrash against it. I became docile.The Parasite did not need force. It just needed me to stop asking questions. I just needed to function and follow the protocols and all would be fine. All procedure. No friction.
No friction to stop the flow of commerce and function, washing away all individuality, slowly eroding the self as the sea erodes the cliff face. Just like the perfectly rounded corners of the chairs, pillars, kiosks, and endless halls, I had become another part of the scenery. Another faceless silhouette in the writhing mass of the faceless mob waiting for their flight to arrive. Mindlessly staring out the windows to the promise of escape.
I just hoped my plane would arrive soon.
