There is nothing that can soothe the mind-grating experience of standing in a line, served through the system like slop through troughs, then ordered to remove your shoes. You must even place your phone in the inspection tray alongside them. Lately I’ve had an issue with my phone where the charging hole is sort of broken, so whenever I charge it I have to bind the cord into a bent-knee-shape while pressing its side against whatever the nearest solid is. Meanwhile, a man gropes my hoodie and suspiciously roams towards my pockets, while my phone, at fifty-seven percent, sits idle inside of my slipper atop the tray, rolling over spinny cylinders.

I am sequestered into the world of gates and gift shops and Starbucks, and the calming signs with fuzzy fonts and lack of guards barking at unruly travelers suspected of cutting the line seems to normalize the experience. But nothing is normal at all. The gift shop is nonsensically bland. If you are a foreign traveller and you get your gifts at the airport, you are being scammed. I walk in and look around because I haven’t owned headphones in a year, and I won’t make this flight if I can’t equilibrate with my preferred form of ambient noise.

Nobody else in the shop took the time to examine the plentiful amount of potential presents for their loved ones back home. I ♥ New York. I ♥ New Jersey. I ♥ Newark. I ♥ Donald Trump. I walk over to the tech aisle and everything is locked. The greatest spoils this store has to offer are guarded by a woman with a large vest on and glasses. Behind them are kind eyes, and she smiles as I point to the similarly glass-encased headphones, unlocked by an indescribable key on her lanyard. I spend ninety dollars on them and feel regretful about it, because of all the free headphones that I lost in crevices or floors or rooms, underneath mattresses or in the pit of Hell between the car seat and the console.

So now I have headphones. I refrained from sleep the night prior and my stomach has begun to open a cavern within itself, and my organs threaten to spill out if they are not sustained. The pizza shop is closed and I don’t eat seafood. Now I’m in the Starbucks line behind someone with airpods and a beanie on. I kind of hate this guy for having airpods because I used to have two pairs of airpods, and I lost them both too. He gets a water and a caramel macchiato and a bag of air that they have in the basket beneath old sandwiches at the front—the first time I’ve ever seen anyone decide on such a purchase. Our coffees arrive at the same time, and I saunter behind him before deciding to speed up around him. Everyone walks too slowly in the airport. I reach the gate and sit. Cold, hard, whatever airport gate seats are made of. The guy with the airpods and the beanie and the caramel macchiato sits across from me and I reel in distress. If I hadn’t sped in front of him, I could have remained far away and hopefully never seen him again. Now, I am chained to his visage, with forty minutes to go until boarding. Loud sighs and yawns and people who unashamedly take calls or play videos on their devices without proper headgear fill the chamber.

Dismayed, I rip the plastic off of the encasing of my gift shop purchase, crumpling it in my pocket next to the Starbucks receipt, ravaging through the box and tearing out the pale wire, pounding the port into the iPhone’s widest hole. Shifting delicately, I nuzzle the buds into my ears, resting against my earlobes, and press play.

The music plays out loud. Immediately I click pause. The headphones suffer from the same issue as the charger. I concede that it makes sense. I jam the beginning of the port close to the wire against my thigh, my cheek caressing my shoulder while my other finger drifts to play. And I can hear the music.