Understand how long these feet have withstood themselves underneath the weight of this body, squished into the shells of these dress shoes, the black leather quarters digging into the instep of my heal and lower ankle. For so long has it been, my tightly knit socks caused pitting edema: the fiber’s weave is now an indented tapestry upon my foot, ankle, and lower calf. My tibial arteries are in a roiled state of distention, having swelled to twice their normal diameter, wheezing blood through walls like water passing through a cinched hose.

My toes are not blue, though I would forgive you if your mind’s eye concluded as much. Instead, the skin beneath my toenails is larva white, gummy, and unresponsive: a medical condition called maceration that occurs when the sweat build-up inside my breathless shoe breaks through the skin of my feet, unbinding the cells and trapping the water within. This process also results in the more common “pruning” of the skin. While not ignorant of this phenomenon, my mind does not think about it, not for one in one trillion thoughts.

I have described my feet to illustrate a larger example of my bodily state after a training: weathered, fatigued, dehydrated, burdened, pained, exhausted, but also fuming — fuming as in high, as in huffing fumes, hallucinating, tripping on the endorphins that flow when the stress concludes upon the relief of a hard day done. You might reminisce on your last hatha yoga class when, after those shaky poses, your teacher names the last asana, Savanasa, corpse pose, and your body crashes in a beatific state of relaxation; how I imagine death will feel once we’re free of breath’s burden.

Now, in this state of ecstatic dysphoria, my brain and body do not feel themselves but are numb and austere, a mere bubble passing through on this locomotive of life, guided only by my intuition and duty as defined by the events on my Outlook calendar. Next up: DL 2738 to Atlanta; back home, my body coasting through the airport with an air of invincibility reserved for a corpse.

The O’Hare airport is unkind to the confused. Most airports are. Government-mandated signs, carefully designed to meet the most conservative accessibility needs, are grossly overwhelmed by the volume and noise of free market signs: priority lanes, advertisements, and flashing LCD panels propagating beautiful women sipping cocktails at dreamy destinations.

Distraction is everywhere. Worse, the airlines have abandoned their help desks and kiosks in favor of digital check-ins and call center services. Help is on its way … out. We resort to our handhelds, but the same screens we require for our boarding pass are the same screens we wrestle with every day, losing our attention and time to thoughtless media, pop-culture videos, music, and shopping.

The walkers-by use only their peripheral vision to look where they’re going. Their foveal vision is shallowly engrossed in a distant world, their minds in a virtual reality.

I weave my way as best I can through the zombie throngs who walk in sporadic zig-zags as digital drunkards. Still, I catch their human words, and my compassion returns; I am just as vulnerable to their woes and pleas. They ask, “Is this where we go? What terminal are we? What is Clear? Are we Pre-Check? Are M gates in Terminal Four or Five? Did we get off at the wrong train stop?” Some languages are languages I do not know, and we can offer only our prayers for those familial imports.

This,” she mouthed in pejorative tones, “is the Preeee-Check line.” What her delusion showed her were none by nincompoops loitering like cattle in a feedlot. We, the herd to be slaughtered, were showing our bunk anxiety, peeved by the haptics from our smart wrists that reminded us further of our lateness to our varied gates.

“If you are not Pree-Check,” she said again, “then take your person and move them back up and out this line to the gen-er-uhl line. Capisce? Ah-huh. That’s what I said. Don’t be thinking you can cut everyone else just because you didn’t pay enough attention to read the sign.”

“Say it with me. Pree-Check. Pree-Check. Pree-Check.”

I did not move my lips but checked my own scowl at this harassment, careful not to multiply the miasma spewing from these violent words. I feigned a distressed smile, more of a puckered smirk, and tried my best not to make eye contact.

The elders in front of me were chattering amongst themselves. The wife confirmed with her spouse that they did indeed have pre-check and would not be subjected to the same verbal blows as the businessman who sulked upstream through the premier line. More tedious moments would pass. My eyes perused the people. Then they fell upon the businessman and his bloodshot eyes, poisoned by shock, shame, and rage as he stood immured by unending stanchions in the perdition that is General Security.

The elder couple did have pre-check — I saw the symbol on their sweat-palmed boarding pass. However, upon their call, the paper boarding tickets refused to scan. “You must go back to your ticket agent,” came the harrowing words from the TSA officer.

(Oh, how words fail me at this moment to describe the exasperation and terror that spread across the elder wife’s face at the thought of caning their way across the literal half-mile of terrazzo, back through the lines to the ticketing counters. Worse, the line not privy to the technical shortcomings of their paper will suspect that their elder dotage has also misunderstood that this is the “Pree-check” line.)

A prayer, my Lord, that these elders find safe passage. Then, the savior. “No, no,” said a more reasonable attendant who appeared from seemingly no where, out from the Versare partition. “Are you pre-check?” They were. “Then all I need is your IDs.”

Finally passing through the security checkpoint, I collected my thoughts and wondered how I could be vulnerable to such meanness.

“Humans,” I reminded myself, “must not divorce themselves from each other.” A quote from a saint, “Do what you want with others, but never put them out of your heart.”

Only moments would pass again before a Delta attendant would scream with impertinent rage against throngs rushing the gate ahead of their boarding zone. She turned to her fellow gate agent and talked aloud about her hapless subjects as if we pigs for slaughter could not hear nor comprehend the gravity of her wise rebukes. Ashamed, her gate agents pretended to ignore the meltdown afflicting her.

She exclaimed heedless admonitions with the contempt most hold for bureaucracy, not their fellow human. Checking in, I checked myself again: smile. Calm. Love. It will be okay. The stress of the day has had its way on all of us. Peace. Calm. Love. It will be okay. Amen.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit substack.qntns.com