Athens Greece -> San Salvador, El Salvador
Once, recently, a friend who is understatedly one part sage, one part earthly and spiritual database, one part brotherly love, and many more parts, recognized that I was in something of dire straits and needed to be “evacuated” from my location at the time, Athens, Greece, to my present location, San Salvador, El Salvador, for a recovery process I absolutely did not want to begin and spent days trying to find my way around. I had announced many times that the 29 hour two stop flight, in combination with my present state of mind, brought about around the most fear I have ever experienced traveling.
How was the flight in comparison to the pure dread I was imagining it to be? It was pure dread, cyclically, for what felt like days. I was in and out of sleep. Half of the time I barely remember knowing anything other than what step was next and how long was left.
A two stop flight is not two parts. You have to first dread going to the airport, then you have to go to the airport, then you wait to check in, security, wait for your gate, wait at the gate, board the plane, wait to take off, actually fly, land and wait to deboard, then, if you’re as lucky as I was, have an entire 9 hours to wait at possibly my least favorite airport in the world, where I slept in many cavernous corners on piles of clothing in the middle of the day constantly waking up with pains in my body.
Then you have to pray you don’t miss your connection, find your next gate, wash and repeat the above process, and then…wait again, in my case, four hours in Panama, which somehow I actually don’t even remember, and then do it again and then have really good friends come pick you up from the airport and then drive an hour in a taxi to a hotel to sleep for one night. And then another hour the next day to move hotels.
The kicker on all this: a few weeks before the trip, I had been at a penthouse party in Milan and met a lovely native El Salvadorian, who happened to be moving back that week, so I said, ‘My friend is also moving there this week, let me call him, he always answers’, and he did, they became aquainted and connected in person shortly after. I met her through another guy at the party, Carlo, who was that one guy during the night where you feel like you are meant to be at the party to meet this one person.
It just so happened that the night I was intending to fly, Carlo had just returned from the Greek islands and was in Athens, so we had met up for drinks, at which point my phone went screen dead, black, literally in the dark. It was around 11pm and the flight was scheduled for around 3am, four hours from then. I wasn’t even sure if it was booked yet. I managed to get in contact with my friend only because the guy I was out to drinks with happened to be the one connected to our now mutual contact on the ground. Otherwise, I was in the dark with my phone.
I got in touch with my friend. I explained the situation to him, which had the added element of the internet at my home not working and my having neither enough money nor any means to get access to a taxi to take me to the airport since public transportation was no longer an option, and I lightly suggested that maybe we should put the flight off to the next day, but also that he was the one in the clearer state of mind and that I would leave the decision up to him. A few minutes later, he wrote back, flight was booked.