Beige
“Flights 217, 813, and 247 boarding now. Again, flights 217-” The voice crackling over the airport intercom startled her, and she felt her phone buzz in her pocket. She pulled it out, glancing at the small screen to see the grinning face of her best friend’s contact photo in her messages.
“How’s it going?”
“It’s going.”
“Sorry love. Still in the airport?”
“Yup. Two more planes, including this one, and we’re burying my dad.”
“Well, send my love to your aunts, and try to put the fun back in funeral.”
“Dude”
“Sorry, but you know he would’ve wanted that.” She sighed. Honestly, she didn’t know what her dad would’ve wanted. After she had moved halfway across the world, something her father had been none too pleased about, they’d lost contact, and though they’d been on good terms when he died, it was still tense at times.
“I guess” She typed, looking around at the open space of the airport. High glass ceilings, tiled floors, and mosaiced walls. Completely average. If she was honest with herself, she really liked the aesthetic of airports. Airports gave the feeling of complete impersonality; they were blank slates with only a fleeting sense of permanence. Millions of people moving in and out of their walls constantly, all of them believing themselves to
be the main characters of their own stories, and yet having virtually no impact on the bustling anonymity of everything. They had no past, and no future, but an infinite present. Airports were beige, waiting for people to add the color of their own adventures onto it’s canvas. As someone who had had enough color for one lifetime, however, she liked their beigeness. There was comfort in steady neutrality.
“Well, try to look on the bright side, and remember, I love you millions! <3”
“Love you too! Millions and more!” Setting her phone into her bag, she quickly glanced at the time. 6:33 am. Her plane left at 7:15, according to the boarding pass slipped in her back pocket, and with nothing left to do, she decided to get a coffee. She was unusually alert for this time of day, possibly due to the knowledge of what was awaiting her in L.A., but the extra caffeine couldn’t hurt. Walking down the length of the airport’s terminal, she began imagining what was waiting for her once she landed. Her aunts, her father’s chronically overemotional sisters, had said that they would pick her up from the airport, but after that point, she didn’t really know what would happen. She was sure that at some point they would bury her dad, but the specifics of the scenario escaped her. She’d never attended a funeral before, and certainly not one for such a close family member, even if close was, at best, a lukewarm description of their relationship. Her dad wasn’t exactly a bad man, but he wasn’t a particularly good one either. One of her aunts had asked her to prepare a speech, so she had, but it was all of the usual, “great man, will be missed,” bullshit. What would she say, she wondered, if her eulogy was honest?
“He was a man of many talents, but speech was not one of them. Neither was emotional intelligence. Neither was being a father, really. He was a man: he was normal, and average, and unextraordinary. He was, on the whole, nice enough, but sometimes he was an asshat. Sometimes he laughed, and I’m assuming that at some point he cried, although I never saw it. I’m sure that for the majority of his life he was content. Maybe
not happy, but content. To his credit, he fought against a tumor for the last 5 years of his life, so he had some strength in him, but in the end he was simply a man. He was beige.” Of course she would miss him, to some extent, but after the distance that had been between them for the last 7 years, it kind of felt like she’d already lost a part of him, so losing the rest didn’t seem like that big of a deal.
“One black coffee please.” Handing the cashier her debit card, she reminisced on the things that she would miss. He may have been beige, but, then again, she liked beige. Beige carried you up the stairs when you sprained your ankle at seven years old. Beige took you on long drives to see the ocean when you were sad, and played 80’s rock the entire 2 hours. Beige yelled at you for sneaking out after curfew. Beige gave the best bear hugs, made amazing grilled cheese, and gave you someplace safe to go when the rest of the world was too full of color. Beige was nice. And suddenly, as she walked back to her luggage in the colorless whirlwind of the airport, coffee in hand, she thought of all the color on the canvas of her life. And she began to cry.
KEEGAN BEVIS is a student at UAA through the Alaska Middle College School. They do competitive writing and speaking as a debater, and she is pursuing a career as a therapist for adolescents.