Don't Let Me Be Lonely: “At the airport-security checkpoint...” by Claudia Rankine

Don't Let Me Be Lonely: “At the airport-security checkpoint...” 
by: Claudia Rankine

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to drink from my water bottle.

                   This water bottle?

                   That's right. Open it and drink from it.

/

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to take off my shoes.

                   Take off my shoes?

                   Yes. Both Please.

/ 

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked if I have a fever.

                   A fever? Really?

                   Yes. Really.

/ 

My grandmother is in a nursing home. It's not bad. It doesn't smell like pee. It doesn't smell like anything. When I go to see her, as I walk through the hall past the common room and the nurses' station, old person after old person puts out his or her hand to me. Steven, one says. Ann, another calls. It's like being in a third-world country, but instead of food or money you are what is wanted, your company. In third-world coun­tries I have felt overwhelmingly American, calcium-rich, privileged, and white. Here, I feel young, lucky, and sad. Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplor­able, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad. 

Naugatuck High School Poetry Out Loud Champion for 2021, Jaida Taveras

I love the title of the book that this poem is from--Don't Let Me Be Lonely.  I think many of us in 2020 felt lonely more than we'd like to admit.  And there are some really scary emotions that follow on that idea of loneliness--isolation, insignificance, unimportant, among so many others.  It was likely the first time many people had to confront their own loneliness, and that is why this poem resonates so powerfully for me on a lot of different levels.

We start off on a trip to go and see someone beloved--at an airport.  These experiences are isolated--cut off from one another spatially, but also they are expressed as discomforts--disbeliefs.  How and why are these moments important?  I think in a lot of ways they are intrusive in a way that until the 2000's we never had to deal with.  They epitomize our fears in strange ways--our carried liquids, our shoes, our temperature.  Liquids can contain biological or chemical weapons.  Shoes can hide components or be bombs.  Fevers can spread diseases--and as we have seen in 2020, contribute to a world-spanning pandemic.  And yet, ...they are also, more often than not, just water, just shoes, just us.

This discomfort of the checkpoint recedes to the journey within the nursing home--passing by strangers longing for contact, loved ones--people who are hoping to be noticed and loved.  And that journey down a hallway, through a place, recalls memories of other times and other places--reflecting on the feelings that seeing this loneliness in others creates within us.  And seeing this loneliness creates a sadness.  And that sadness has words that describe it that are...more than just words.  And in the end, we see how this use of words can create a different kind of isolation--a sadness in the way we think of ourselves in light of the words that have been used to describe a thing--this loneliness.

Taken together, this reflection on a journey--the external one, to the grandmother; and this internal one, reflecting on these discomforts, isolations, lonelinesses, and sadnesses; are important reflections on who we are--not just as individuals, but as a collective whole.  And while these reflections are personal, the experiences are not.  If you travel to an airport to go somewhere, you will inevitably meet with these situations.  And if you find yourself in a nursing home, you will inevitably see these things.  So there is a collective truth in them.

But the most important part of this poem, I think, is that last part--about the words we use to describe feelings, and it is something that many mental health experts and people who study mental health have been talking about a lot lately.  It's this idea that we have often chosen words to describe feelings like loneliness and sadness with a color--darkness, blackness.  And that color is also reflected in how we describe people and persons.  And if that's the case, how does that reflect on those people, and isn't that a truly sad thing?

Our words can create loneliness.  Our words can isolate us from one another.  And so it is important to consider these things as we move forward.  Maybe it's time to change the way we look at these things--mental illness, nursing homes, and even travel.  Maybe it's important to consider the way we look at others whose skin color is different than our own, and realize that maybe the way we unconsciously and consciously describe others is important.  It can have real consequences.  And maybe it's time to change somehow so that we're not creating sadness, discomfort, isolation, and loneliness with those words.