How Long?

I sat on the hard gray bench in 207A, tears slowly rolling down my cheeks. My anxious husband asked, What happened?

I don't know! I sniffled. 

Was it something in the security? You were fine before we went through security. 

I knew it had been triggered by the screening agent's demand to take off my belt and put it through the x-ray machine, making me feel super embarrassed. Men were forever taking off belts but it felt humiliating to stand there, struggling to take off my belt in public while people hurried past me. 

Then my husband's backpack got flagged; he had an RFID pocket that often showed up on the x-ray and warranted a secondary search. The lady scrabbled through his backpack, pulling out storage bags, pencil cases, and hard drive cases, opening and poking through each one. She finally decided the x-ray machine had flagged the prongs of his phone charger plug, pushed the bags towards his laptop, and shrugged Everything is okay as she went off to do something else. Most screening agents returned the items to the bag and zipped it up, but no, this one wasn't about to be bothered to do so. So he was left alone, trying to gather all his various sundry items and put them back where they belonged. 

It must have been the straw that broke the camel's back, or the drop in the bucket that overflowed. After 10 days of packing up our lives and then unpacking them, I had finally reached my emotional breaking point. I'd been struggling with severe allergies that refused to abate even with medication. They were just starting to settle down but the wheezing still kept me up nights. My plantar fasciitis was flaring up, even with daily stretches, from the thousands of steps we were walking every day. My hands and ankles were swollen and I looked like a beached whale with the 50+ extra pounds I was carrying. I was tired and I needed a break. 

And so I cried. Thankful for the anonymity of the airport waiting areas, I let the tears fall, knowing eventually they would stop and when they did, I would be okay again. Or maybe not. Maybe some of the tears came from a place of pain and frustration at the injustices we'd been suffering through, and would continue to. Things that would never be righted in this world; and it felt like neither in the one to come.