Location: Sacramento Airport Date: Saturday, January 19 Time: Morning (@jenbrookhart)
She’d woken up this morning before the sun, filled with a restless discontent. The Foxes had won, but she didn’t have the bone-deep tiredness that came from playing a full-out game to lull her to sleep. Instead, it was just a big ole nothingness: sitting on a plane—(for the first time in her life)—just to go sit on a bench.
Just to turn around and sit on a plane again.
She’d spent the journey to California glued to the window, trying to make out the ground through the breaks in the clouds. She was equal parts rapt and tense, her heart in her throat with every shift and bump. It had felt silly—she’d felt every inch the smalltown girl, the one who’d never been out of Missouri until she’d hitchiked her way out. Most of the time, she doesn’t try to hide it, but this time she’d wanted to. She’s got pride, after all. She feels equally on edge in this airport: there’s just so many people, all of them tense and hurrying to-and-fro. She feels like she can’t hear herself think, like it’s all pressing in on her.
There’s a frazzled family, parents trying to herd their children to their destination, laden down with all of their belongings. Glory, her gaze drawn out the window to the waiting planes all lined up in a row, swerves at the last minute to get out of their way—and straight into someone else.
"Fuck!” She says, a little bit too loud as she stumbles and rights herself, her bag slipping off her shoulder and her team water bottle falling out of her hands and rolling into the mass of seats and people by the gate. At her swearing, the parents of the family she’d just avoided running into give her twin dirty looks, and all she can do is stand there. Close her eyes, pinch the bridge of her nose until she doesn’t feel like she’s going to scream.
She cracks one eye open and then—when she sees the person she ran into is, at least, someone she knows in passing—the other one. “Sorry, I just—well, sorry.”
