Click below to see each completed day in the journey.
—Next destination: Salt Lake City, Utah (in transit); Minneapolis, Minnesota (in transit); Des Moines, Iowa, USA
6:45 AM
We walked towards our departing flight in the Pocatello Regional Airport. My mind was deep in thought.
Just a little bit earlier, I had been watching the still-dark sky outside, sitting there and eating the last of my hardier mixed cabbage leaves out of a plastic bag with a few nuts and remaining blueberries tossed in.
This much alone, I figured, guarantees I’m nothing like anyone else here.
…But, wait… that couldn’t be right. Maybe I was only thinking that because I was so tired. I mean, wasn’t that just pure arrogance?
But deep down, I felt what I did: almost something like… gladness to have thought it.
The passenger in front of me then stretched her arms across her, and so I did the same before sitting down. If, that’s one healthy cue I should take… I thought.
After walking for miles the previous night, then rising to catch my taxi and get to the airport on time at this early hour, I was indeed in need of a stretch to say the least… not to mention outright rest I knew I wasn’t going to get to have. This flight would be less than an hour. Then, after the layover in Salt Lake City once more, the next flight would be a good 4 additional hours… then there’d be a third flight from Minneapolis.
And yet…
9:11 AM
…As I sat in Salt Lake City’s International Airport for the second time, looking out yet another window with my phone charging beside me, and practicing basic Farsi, Chinese, Japanese, and Polish on the backs of my receipts from buying yet more dried fruits, water, and mixed nuts to last me for a while (instead of getting anyone’s starched-sugared-dairy-bun anything)…
I watched people as they walked nearby. Many tired; neutral expressions on their faces… Most with the softly frantic looks of needing to get on with their usual working routines.
Earlier I had thought to get some plain green tea for myself at the Starbucks in this terminal, if to simply wake up… but I immediately turned back around in almost hilarious futility when I saw that I could barely even approach the place. People were already having to clumsily maneuver in, out, and around the slews of other people blocking the main path’s traffic, all just to line up as soon as they could to get their coffee-fixes for the morning.
(Coffee itself, a starch-bean-drink. Something else I no longer partook in and couldn’t say I missed.)
An older airport employee who was wheeling a cart past me smiled and said good morning, and I smiled and wished him a good morning back. I felt a little happy for that small niceness, if as socially awkward as ever at the same time.
Then, I looked back at my Chinese and Japanese numbers, 1 through 10.
Yi, er, san, su, wu, leo, qi, ba, jeo, shi…
Ichi, ni, san, yon, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyu, juu.
This time, I’d finally remembered how to write “seven,” and pronounce “nine.”
I looked back up.
…
Who ELSE is doing this????? I candidly thought.
10:25 AM
I sipped some of my plain green tea and placed the cup beside me on the carpet. (The unreal Starbucks crowd had since finally died down.) In the time I still had left, I had practiced a tiny bit of guitar as quietly as I could, gotten my tea, used the restroom, and looked once again at some of the restaurants nearby. Although I noted as dryly as ever how, call it a ‘kolache,’ a ‘donut,’ a ‘bao’, or a ‘bun,’ it was all just giving different shapes to the exact same starch, sugar, and fat… One of the bao shapes combined with kolache of it all did inspire me in a technical sense.
I wrote in my notes:
Try, when I get back home, to make my own filled-savory-bun foods. Possibly with egg-whites to bind an outer-shell made of almond flour, or cabbage leaves.
And being inspired by that much, I equally decided to try looking up some of Utah’s regional produce online before leaving it for the last time in this trip. One of my dear friends cracked me up as they joked about the potential edibility or else deadly poison of the “four o’clock” flower bulb since this time, they were mildly curious about what I was doing. (That is, before telling me about their sleep apnea apparatus they had had to wear that night.)
Energies of the previous day confirmed: onions in general. Those chives I’d secretly added to my omelet tasted delicious.
5:30PM – Minnesota local time
Call it the thrill of being in movement; of taking off and flying in the sky… yes, even in these conditions… or call it my constantly active mind in most of my waking hours. Whichever was the case this time around, I never could fall asleep on a plane, no matter how tired I might be.
I preoccupied myself instead. When I wasn’t looking outside my window at patchwork fields, clouds, and mountains below us, I listened to some of the music I’d downloaded for the trip, journaled in my phone’s memo pad, and tried to leaf through some of the flight’s magazines in the seat pouch in front of me.
At least I can make myself laugh here, I thought warmly, as I chuckled at one of the magazines’ most self-contradictory ads.
I’d politely declined the in-flight lunches offered to me; for whatever vegetables were possibly present, I knew not to take a chance on the otherwise sugar-and-starch-steeped plates overall.
And I did thank the staff instead for the complimentary dried, sugarless fruit snacks they offered. In smaller portions, I could handle that much: I needed the energy to stay awake.
We’d had about one hour left on the flight, when I got the vaguest reception of what ((I)) had collected, somehow, back in Austin: ((“…powered by me…”))
Was ((I))… skimming through a bookstore?
As then, I overheard the travelers in the seats in front of me talking about how tired they themselves were… except on their ends, they were reluctantly expecting to have to return to their hectic job positions after the brief vacation they were apparently on.
I sighed.
Same old story I KEEP hearing... and I put my headphones back on right around the time they began about details of our country’s latest school shooting.
My spirits weren’t high at this stage.
But, having now landed in Minneapolis, I was determined to find something during my layover that I could personally connect to before leaving.
After all, I used to live here, I reminded myself, Even if I was just a baby at the time. There’s got to be SOMETHING linked here for me…
6:27PM
Thankfully, I soon found that something— the Prince Store, which was decked in memorabilia from the purple-clad icon himself.
It turned out that Prince was a Minnesota-born artist when he was still alive— as and ultimately, he’s an artist I hold great respect for. His complex melodies, songwriting skills, and unshakable self-confidence are all traits I admire to this day. (If yes, sometimes his vocalization choices raise my eyebrows— I’m looking at you, “When Doves Cry”.)
And… I remembered what he meant for me to remember. Call it whatever you want or will believe for yourself: a little over a year ago now, I’d felt Prince’s spirit speak to me in a dream. Not because he ever knew me personally, and I only knew him by his most popular music on the radio… But to this day, I think Prince had decided to posthumously gift me like this simply because it’s what I needed to hear—out of the kindness of his heart and wanting to empower people, period.
It was a short, pure, and simple message. As Prince absolutely had so much confidence in who he was and what he did well, he imparted to me that I, Yasmine, should do the same for myself.
“Now, I must be getting up, my darling,” he had told me in my dream, as he had the public to sing to, after all!
If I myself really wanted to help others and make any of this sorrow better, I too needed to get up and keep doing my own thing. Continue to be as different as I could recognize I was being.
For no matter what… no, it certainly wasn’t that my life was perfect– not that it could ever be in a world where violence abounds indeed. But bottom line, I equally couldn’t deny how I just wasn’t suffering in half the ways I kept hearing my friends, family, and so many others were. ‘Powered by me,’ indeed.
I walked out of the Prince Store, the only souvenir I needed already with me. I sensed ((I)) was happily listening to more music instruction videos online while working on TL pages.
7:25 PM
Dinner: another meat-patty stripped of its starchy bun, sugary condiments requested to be withheld, and meat-patty itself chopped up on top of a portable green salad that one of the airport’s other restaurants thankfully sold. With some of my added seasonings, it was altogether passable.
I typed some last notes before our plane took off:
… Minnesota’s regional produce…. not much variation from that of Utah or Idaho; however, blueberries are fairly prominent. Feels right… like the tasty ones from yesterday. For the next guidebook, maybe I can see how blueberries can be so different in different climates of the world– how do northern blueberries do their thing, versus the ones I saw locally grown and sold as bushes at H-E-B in Austin, versus the ones that came shipped all the way from Peru?
It certainly was enough to be getting on with. Now I was exhausted; my head was killing me, and I still had one final day of my period. I needed to get to my hotel as soon as we landed…
10 PM – Iowa local time
Thankfully the hotel was just a straight, short walk from the Des Moines International Airport.
It had still been a little scary to walk at night across Fleur Street… once again alone in another new-to-me-place… but regardless of my fear, I kept my cool and made it just fine. If the plane goes down NOW, I had thought to myself as I walked determinedly, recalling the lyrics of one my favorite Jason Mraz songs, then damn.
I checked in, put my bags in the corner, and pushed myself to shower. I knew I needed to record just one more note to myself before finally crashing:
I’m only able to do this entire travel and ((soul experience)) because I can see clearly what’s going on… That’s what differentiates me. I must go to sleep now. Tomorrow’s a day of paperwork and driving for reals.
-Day 3: End-