In theory, a weekend trip is the perfect break. Stayed elsewhere for two nights with only a small duffel bag and limited logistics standing between you and reset. Go out on Friday, come back on Sunday, fill the time with enough novelty, and come back refreshed, or at least with a slightly changed perspective. You might go on a weekend getaway, work, or visit family, but the effect is the same. You’ve changed a bit since you came back. Your perspective on daily life is a little different.
This past weekend, I was planning on taking a quick trip to attend my college graduation, which was technically a quick trip: I was barely gone for 48 hours, but the extreme weather kept me stuck in limited space for much of that time. In space. An old friend once called these realms of neither here nor there “zero worlds” because they feel detached from reality, parallel yet separate from everyday life. After the fourth lightning delay was announced, inside the cabin was already a world very different from the one you knew, a makeshift society of makeshift citizens except for a deep-seated belief: We need to get out of here, and there probably isn’t much of them common ground.
Like my fellow travelers, I was grumpy and impatient with every complication of the journey, but also fascinated by the communities, customs, and Cibo Express markets of World Zero. At any given time, each of us refrained from throwing a tantrum over the captain’s announcement, but we were also very careful to remain polite to each other and the airline staff, as if determined to justify those wild videos of grumpy being duct-taped to our seats The passengers on board do not represent us, the temporary civilization of this waiting room.
When I finally arrived, the graduation ceremony was a joy, despite a few hiccups. The speaker, an astronaut, showed a photo of the farm where she grew up and considered it her home for most of her life. Then she showed a photo of the edge of the Earth, the glowing edge of the atmosphere, and described how when she went into space, home was no longer a town on a map, but the planet, and I felt such a huge shift in perspective just thinking about it. A little disgusting.
