Tegucigalpa, Honduras—

“Well, it’s better to be prepared” says the TSA officer to my befuddled comment about how no one was in line that morning. Feeling blessed by the same gods that smiled upon me by allowing me to stay in the Marriott located within the airport premises, have a nice dinner that didn’t screw up my digestive system and a breakfast that kickstarted it with sufficient oomph, I cleared security in about a minute and made my way to gate E15, not even feeling tired about having to carry around my 25 pound duffle/backpack – it’s another story, how I managed to travel carry-on only for the first time, and the blisses and woes thereof – and found a comfy seat for the 1.5 hour wait ahead. I scanned the waiting area looking for my fellow passengers: when returning to Honduras, it’s always a curious experiment in voyeurism to try to figure out their stories: the nouveau riche lady who talks loudly and feels entitled, strangely because she flies with Delta, but also acts nicely like her former, more humble, self; the inexplicable japanese woman who looks maybe young or maybe well preserved and whose face belies a complete lack of command of the language she’ll be surrounded by soon, the old ladies who look completely lost and who one wonders how they made it here, let alone how they managed to get by in the depths of very white america, the experienced businessman, the crazy-eyed disheveled gringo who turns out to be canadian, the old, humble campesino with a hat, jeans, a pile jacket and huge duffel bags who turns out to be traveling with his equally adorable and weathered wife, the rich kids who reek of business class and won’t mix with us mortals, and the flock of missionaries who act with infinite kindness but who the devil in my shoulder can’t stop labeling as neocolonialist threats; the younger dudes who look like they work in technology or finance but who have the air of the luchador: someone who was raised in the country and went to school in the capital, and still has the manners and humility instilled in them by their elders; a jet-setter couple who look like best friends and who, despite their affluence, act friendly towards everyone. Every single one of these people I observe with furtive glances from my chair to pass the time, and every one keeps to themselves or their companions, respecting the sanctity of the waiting lounge, or simply too tired to socialize. Every time I’ve waited in airports I’m left to just imagine what their stories are, who they are, how they comport themselves, because the waiting time is too short for anything to bring us together, and because once boarding happens any bonds made there will shatter, like any of the ones made aboard a plane: sometimes you lose people at the immigration line, because they lag behind or breeze through before you, sometimes at baggage check, always when we go back to the real world; sometimes not even a goodbye happens, nary a wave, a nod, a meaningful glance – for your rapport was ephemeral and once life resumes the life you lived in your flight is gone – and, save for those little snippets of human connection or amusement that sometimes sprinkle the otherwise anxiety-laden experience, good riddance, too. But not this time.

It’s 1 in the morning, the airport is dead: only a few little islets of arriving or departing flights save the terminals from being a haunted chapel of human restlessness, the flight from JFK has landed on time, some people muster the final bit of exertion to get themselves home or to a hotel or wherever they’ll sleep away the flight, some other brave souls come to terms with the fact that this is the beginning of a long sojourn in the uncozy womb of the Houston George Bush Airport, waiting for dawn, for the crowds, and for their next flight. Industrious, a man sits down to sift through his work emails, do a bit of research to reply to them, populate spreadsheets and otherwise burn the hours away with work; another, less devoted or perhaps less engaged in earthly concerns, builds himself a cocoon respectfully in one seat, cradled by his bags and jacket, and nods into a shallow slumber; a Canadian man reads, a couple huddles together. These five are going to Tegucigalpa the next morning, in flight 1540.

Soon after, at four in the morning, so late the witching hour is past, the flight that was scheduled to land two hours before finally touches ground after going through unusually pregnant skies: it’s darker than the usual darkest hour in the night here in Houston, it has been raining for hours now and the bayous are starting to reclaim what roads took from them; desperate passengers alight from the aircraft and into the sanctity of a spacious, quite, grounded edifice: they were rerouted to Dallas and had to wait for an hour while the plane was refueling, without any certainty whether they’d make it to their destination or have to figure things out in an unexpected city while spending the night. After the transatlantic flight from Geneva, a couple starts discussing alternatives: they’re seasoned travelers, albeit weary, and a snag such as this will not faze them; a lone traveler, on the other end of the cabin, also starts brewing plans: he may be new to this, but he’s no coward. An elderly couple gently snoozes this away, oblivious to the nascent anguish in the air.

A deluge of flood and tornado alerts kept me half awake for most of the wee hours of a long night of sleep, wary, I turned on the TV on the weather channel while getting ready for breakfast, afraid they’d say flights were being cancelled, but accepted the tenuous consolation of that phrase never being said: only that driving was being banned in certain areas due to floods. Breakfast in the M Club Lounge was generous: a buffet of fresh fruit, pastries, cold cuts, southern biscuits & white sauce and a chef who would make any kind of eggs for the customer; I went with an omelette and, after fumbled to communicate in English in the awkward exchange two native Spanish speakers have when they suspect the other speaks it too, we made the transition to our mother tongue and talked about Honduras, about how he had visited San Pedro Sula before it got dangerous, and about food: about the hot sauce he himself made for the restaurant, about how hot sauce on omelettes and white sauce on biscuits were marriages of flavor he had found to be excellent synergies, and then stopped talking as he went back to work – an ephemeral island of Spanish, of complicity as he subtly criticized the American customers and their greedy consumption of the buffet, another story I could only imagine: maybe he had been raised in the states, maybe he, like so many others, had gone through the long travails of the illegal alien to finally land a legitimate gig. Rushing through breakfast to pay respects to the porcelain throne before checking out, an American soldier sat next to me and blazed through a spartan serving, and yet again I wondered about the other human beings in my periphery: too shy to reach out, too curious to ignore.

Text message: your flight now leaves at 10:30 due to severe weather, a bit of delay before it shows up in the public screens at the gate; unrest amidst the passengers, hushed conversations wondering the why and wherefore, me resigning to stop killing time and spend the extra hour doing something worthwhile, like writing about the trip that was very soon to come to a happy conclusion; an hour goes by in a typhoon of unproofread words, another status change: 12:00, delayed incoming aircraft. More unrest, an elderly lady left alone temporarily by her adult daughter asks the Japanese lady “it’s 10:15, shouldn’t we be boarding? The flight leaves soon.”, the addressee apologizes in English, I, eternal eavesdropper, interject with a save for both, in Spanish: “Señora, the flight was delayed again, now it leaves at noon”; worry in her face, gratitude in the japanese lady’s, who minutes after asks me if I can keep an eye on her bags while she pops off to the loo; the daughter returns and the mother explains, two other men: a lone traveler and a brightly-clad husband-dude, both coming from the New York flight, joined the lamentation party and quickly shared their story of duress the previous night, and the lone traveler leveraged the spontaneous banding of the adrift to ask me for an iPhone charger. In a matter of minutes, I had built tenuous bridges to a handful of my flight companions, and felt poetically satisfied.

It’s 11 am, the flight has been delayed again to 2 pm, I’ve quit the waiting lounge to get some lunch: too chicken to ask for where the NYC couple and the Delta-flying lady had gotten the affordable-looking general Tso’s chicken, I made my way to the sit-down restaurant nearby and got a pilsner and pan-seared salmon from the extremely nice young waiter who inquired about the goodness of my meal every few minutes thereon, and, my glycemic normality reached again, felt good about the day, despite the uncertainty and oft-delayed flight. All smiles upon my return, I rejoined our merry band as we all commented on how it had stopped raining and the overcast skies were finally being shyly pierced by the rays of a sun we had almost given up on seeing, and waited for the new boarding time, this time was surely the charm.

It was not.

2 pm rolls by with its typical heaviness: the airport is crowded now, my clothes feel uncomfortably soft from the heavy atmosphere, my throat feels swollen and my hypochondriac mode isn’t helped by another passenger randomly saying in conversation “I think I’m coming down with something”; my zen has been broken because it’s 2 pm and we’re definitely not yet in the flying steel prison that would convey us home. Someone from United walks to the counter, this is it, we’re free, right at the moment we’re starting to truly feel trapped, we’re liberated, we’re going home!

But we were not.

Flight cancelled: the flooded streets had prevented crew from reaching the airport on time, the weather doesn’t look good enough yet, an impenetrable haze, to boot, has settled on the terminus of our journey and we wouldn’t be able to land anyway. We’re herded to customer service, a line of frustrated straphangers forms, a United employee is working his way through the line with a portable receipt-and-boarding-pass printing contraption, I feel a sliver of elation at this show of mercy. He reaches me, prints a boarding pass in a tiny piece of thermal paper: standby. I won’t abide by this, I can’t believe his mediocre rationalization that surely I’ll get a seat in a most definitely overpopulated flight, some people in the line do, however, they quit because they’re tired, perhaps because they have faith. I see the NYC couple quit but gravitate around the area waiting for the rest of us, they have hotel discount tickets in their hands, a further measure of appeasement. The businessman, the Canadian, the innocent-looking youngster and all the others seem to have chosen to stay in line too, we discuss options, we google other flights and the best and soonest flight out of here is… the same flight we didn’t take, the next morning, the one the United employee put us in standby for – other flights are ludicrous, taking more than 10 hours with preposterous layovers in other states or El Salvador. Realizing I’ll have to sleep here, I load up hotels nearby online and, aghast though not surprised at the marriott selling out, I settle for a holiday inn which seems to have a good room, breakfast and a shuttle. The lady at the counter is a saint: not only is she not frustrated with the armies of definitely not happy people she’s seen, she takes her time to make sure I get a decent seat and even helps me out with the hotel by calling many times until she gets through to get confirmation from them their shuttle is still working: I worry about the floods. As I wait, one of the older ladies is trying to get the next flight, but her colloquy partner doesn’t speak spanish, and both look dejected at the impossibility of communicating. Again a meddler, I interject and translate the latest phrase the customer service lady is trying to slowly explain to the Señora, and take care of the rest of the conversation, even the apologetic part where the C.S. lady gives a “survival kit” to the Señora: a humble zip-seal bag with a toothbrush, a small Colgate, deodorant, a comb, a razor and shaving cream, “in case she needs to sleep at the airport”; the señora leaves with her hotel discount ticket and kit, I don’t see who takes care of her and turn to talking hotels with the businessman, the Canadian and the youngster, the former two quickly band up and chose to share a double room – experienced and extroverted, the businessman suggests the youngster and I do the same: we’re both young, perhaps we want to save some bucks and not have to deal with the day alone? I prefer the alone bit, but the guy – Jorge, the only name I actually ever knew in this adventure – jumps at the suggestion and I feel guilt and, honestly, relief at letting him know I already have a single room, but that I’ll help him look for a room in the same hotel or another one.

A metal bench next to the customer service counters becomes a temporary base of operations: I tell the couple that came from Switzerland and Jorge about how I think United tried to screw us up by sending an emissary to put us in stanby instead of having to use up their open seats – which they were obliged to do in the hands of actual customer service employees – and about how I wouldn’t be surprised that the discount ticket is no longer being given because “there are no hotels”, but because there are no hotels that are in the same network as United so they can’t hook us up with a discount. We talk about the Marriott and how reachable it is, and then I shatter their dreams by showing them how it’s most definitely sold out. The couple shies away from the plan of staying in an extra-airport hotel, putting forth the very wise argument that, even if we can reach it this afternoon, another overnight heavy rain may make the trek back to the airport impossible. Naïve and wide-eyed, and beholden on my side by an existing reservation I can’t cancel without paying the first night anyway, Jorge and I soldier on and go online. My hotel is no longer available, a pang of guilt strikes again: I could’ve asked if my room had two beds, I could’ve moved faster, I could’ve cancelled there and stayed with Jorge so he wouldn’t have to manage alone – the couple and I have taken Jorge under our collective wingspan, even though he’s probably just a couple of years my junior – but I try earnestly to get him a decent hotel from a rapidly dwindling list. We stay for a while. Upon discovering that the husband studied in Frankfurt with Deutsche Welle, we fawn together over the marvels of staying in Germany while the wife and Jorge talk about life: she discovers that Jorge is going to get his graduate degree in Sweden later that year but is dithering and afraid Europe will be harsh on him. We give him a pep talk on how Scandinavia is the Europe of Europe, and then we youngsters listen to the marvelous accounts of the scenic railway through Switzerland and quickly delve into another fawning episode on the cheap and ubiquitous public transportation across the Atlantic.

The layout of airports has always fascinated me, american ones more so: I had wondered if we’d have to do passport control again upon exiting the airport, but was relieved and fascinated by the fact that the terminal has a one-way escalator to baggage claim, effectively allowing people who left the border control area, or people who cleared security but didn’t board, leave the international terminal but not come back again. Jorge and I, unaware of this irreversibility, don’t think twice when riding that selfsame escalator. Baggage claim leads directly to ground transportation, and I remain puzzled as to how and who controls that no one can just walk from the street, take a bag and get out of there. And, again, feel relief at not having checked bags for this trip. We wait for the shuttle, there’s no one in charge apparently, no information boards, no seeming order to this chaos. We go to the only semblance of organization in sight: the line to taxis. Jorge worries about the price, I just want to get out of there. I abide. We reach the end of the line, I let Jorge go first; a heavily accented man asks for my destination and quickly dismisses me “that street is flooded, you’re going in the same direction as that guy”, I look where he points, and Jorge emerges: our adventure isn’t quite over.

Losing my calm again, feeling groggy and dirty, we go back in dismay trying to find the super shuttle office: “we can’t take you, super shuttle may”. “I drive super shuttle, yes, but you have to book one, go to the office in side baggage claim”. We go inside, the office is nowhere in sight, I feel slighted like a character in Kafka; doomed to stay in the airport, we go to the Marriott to see if maybe they have a room left, I’m willing to let a stranger invade my sacrosanct space for a night if we get a double room, I just want to be out of the crowd. The nice marriott employee foresees our purpose as soon as we walk in and nods from a distance: “there’s no room guys, let me get you a list of hotels”. Both of our hotels are in the list, yet the shuttles never show up and they’re not picking up their phones. Jorge, more daring than yours truly, calls his hotel and cancels the reservation upon learning that they’ve officially cancelled the shuttle. I cling on to hope, aided by a hotel that never picked up again.

Back to the shuttle waiting area, I see “holiday inn” on the side of the van and quickly abandon my companion, we say hurried goodbyes – still guilt softly whispers in my ear as I know he’ll be spending the night in the airport, tired, sick, and without a change of clothes, though I wondered what he did have in that rolling suitcase he and everyone in his wake kept stumbling on. It’s not even my shuttle, there’s two or maybe an infinite amount of Holiday Inns. Alone, guilt-ridden and tired, but unladen, guarding my bags in the floor, and unwilling to give up hope, I wait. I try to meditate, I try to secondhand smoke upon learning it’s the smoking area and seeing young smokers in my vicinity. I curse the southern gods for always stranding me in the part of the states I have a mixture of disinterest and fear on. Angrily I kill the minutes. And then apotheosis: a holiday inn shuttle appears, manned by a different driver. Seeing the question in my eyes before I utter it, the driver says “we’re going to the Holiday Inn east, is this you?”. The anger drops like a towel in a cheap porno, I all but throw my big bag in and aboard the small van next to a big man. A southern couple dressed in summer-light clothes boards last, deep in their sixties, they’re blissful and declare “it’s our honeymoon!”. The driver and fellow passengers commiserate, and joke with them, their good humor is infectious and makes the short drive through the meagerly overflowed bayou – we have bigger floods every time it rains in Tegucigalpa and no one cares, though maybe it’s had plenty of time to dry by now – all five miles to the hotel a very welcome solace.

It’s happy hour at the Holiday Inn: there’s coors lite in the keg, a cute popcorn machine, two dudes manning the front desk and being incredibly nice despite being obviously busy. Rooms aren’t ready so we’re invited to help ourselves to beer and popcorn, hungry, I treat myself to a Cheetos and pay the one dollar import to the nice man in the front desk. The lack of food in my stomach, and maybe the emotional rollercoaster of this ordeal, made the otherwise scorned pisswater that is coors lite fill me with a joyous forgiveness of all that transpired, and a relaxation of my condemnation so thorough I had no problem being the last to be assigned a room. Gravitating around the popcorn machine, I made small talk to a researcher who was on his way to Costa Rica – he was very curt with his answers, so I was left to assume he was a top secret researcher manufacturing Zika or something tinfoil-y like that, though most likely he was just wary of strangers. As any sober non-drunk person should be.

Clutching my recently bequeathed upon hotel key like my most precious possession, I boarded the elevator to the third floor, looking forward to a shower. A drunk looking bearded man boarded with me, going to the second floor. As we stand there in respectful drunken silence, the elevator reaches the first of its stops and… nothing. He groans and presses the call button, which I had never seen used and says “boss, the elevator got stuck, again!”, the voice of the nice front desk man comes out loud and clear “jesus christ, I’m on my way”. Having had a full day of transportation disappointments, this doesn’t shock me as much as it should have, and the bearded man just kicks the door unlocked and pushes it to the side: I see that the elevator got stuck just inches from the floor, so the escape is as swift as uneventful as I would’ve hoped in my wildest dreams: the whole episode took a minute at most. And onwards to the stairs.

In the room, dying to get a shower, I discover that the faucet lever falls if you jiggle it too much, and that despite an assortment of small and medium towels, they forgot the bath ones. I don’t give a crap. The long awaited hot water washes away the lingering funk, I take my sweet time: alone at last, unencumbered from my dirty clothes, my mouth finally clean and my hear shedding all the gunk it collected in its waxed chambers. Twelve hours after the beginning of the day, I have certainty and elation at last: I’m getting dinner.

The lack of a restaurant in the hotel quickly dissolved my faint hopes of getting another fancy dinner of NY steak and pinot noir; yet I’ve overheard the front desk men telling other famished tenants about restaurants in the vicinity: my mind’s eye envisions a wonderland full of cheap but attractive options: a pizza joint with a family ambiance and cold, cold beer; a chinese restaurant with its reliable and sempiternal menu, the weird experience of a hooters as proudly announced in the hotel’s brochure as one of the many “bars and lounges” in the immediate proximity, a bagel sandwich somewhere that was “quite good”. With a spring in my step and avoiding the elevator for the decidedly more reliable and healthy medium of the stairs, I approach these fine gentleman for my turn on being educated in the gastronomic geography of our area, and learn that yes, there are restaurants nearby: a pizza joint, a sonic, a waffle house!

Emerging into the biped-unfriendly sidewalks of houston, clad in my button down shirt and navy jeans, I soon learn with dismay that the distances are negotiable by cars: wide streets without crossing lights separate me from what appears to be the dining quarter, and, unwilling to do any amount of whatever may resemble extreme physical exertion and a display of expert alertness, I settle for the pizza place. It’s a small place with a few tables and uninviting choices, but I’ve decided to get some pizza and beer – from the adjacent 7-11 – to go and check out some netflix, or porn, from my offline porn stash if streaming is not an option, since all wholesome movies I had were either erased to save space or just too much to watch, I wait patiently for my turn to order.

Armed with three slices of pizza, I’m glad to see many options beyond the usual pisswater in the fridge; a scary looking dude says “hmm, pizza, you should get an IPA with that man, or a boston lager, they don’t seem to have IPA”; encouraged by this kind stranger, I take the boston lager and a dark ale – I’ve long accepted that the IPA fad is not my thing, life is bitter enough to drown it in hops – and the guy at the counter continues the string of mild disappointments by telling me I can’t buy singles from a six pack. Directed to the icebox, I grab, by curiosity and probably a faint association to an adventure finished, a “modelo chelada”, which looks like a partial michelada. But it’s tall, and cold, and peculiar. Transaction over, the nice cashier asks “wait, bro, how old are you??”, and inexplicably forgetting my own age, I stutter “twenty… seven? I dunno, I wish I was younger to still be in school and not give a fuck”. Satisfied by genuine adult apathy, he says “cool bro, have a nice night”.

Back in the room, smug as a winner for having procured a tasty sad dinner, I load up some netflix and then some fun porn dialog scenes while washing down cold pizza with a strangely weak, but nevertheless refreshing, “chelada”, and feel grateful that the wi-fi works here to finally let my beloved and my family know that yes, I’m alive, and I’ll try to make it out the next day.

It’s a longer line for security the next morning, but I’m relieved that the shuttle was on time – and guilty that I forgot a half-peeled orange in it – and that the front desk let me go even though, in my fear of having a groundhog day situation, I was technically to sleep there two nights, with the proviso I call them so they figure it out (spoiler: I never called them because I didn’t care they charged me for the two nights, they were hella nice; and two days later they credited the second night back to my card. The southern weather may have thwarted my travel twice this year, but its people have been nothing but kind). Behind me, a lady chats up a security guard and proffers the incredibly insightful “I’m one of the people who were supposed to fly yesterday, you see people’s true colors in these situations, and so far I like what I’ve seen”. I couldn’t agree more: we may be self-interested sometimes, but I saw more kind and spontaneously helpful strangers than I saw jerks, so I smiled and let go of whatever sliver of lingering frustration may have been lurking in my tired mind; sensing my approachability, an incredibly laden young man who kinda sounded like a smuggler of sorts (I overheard him talking with his friend about how my backpack looked perfect “for their trips”) addresses me about my bag and I oblige with the gospel of fjällräven, and he says thanks and bye without the awkward association that I feared might have ensued. It’s onwards back to terminal E for me.

We’re in gate E24 this time, most of my companions are there: the couple, Jorge, the elderly lady and her daughter, the cute campesino couple, the young dude, businessman and canadaman. The swiss-visiting couple tell me that they had a nice evening, Jorge and the husband go to buy some duty free perfumes and the wife and I exchange pleasantries before I go get some breakfast to complement the coffee I had in my room and the orange I didn’t have in the shuttle. It didn’t rain at all, most of us seem to have made it. There’s optimism in the air, but there’s a ghost of apprehension: we see the minutes tickle by in the screen, sure the dance of delays with the coup de grace of cancellation will happen again, I’m in peace with my solipsist role as the bill murray of this malarkey. It’s 8:40, the flight is still on time. The crew are starting to show up. The standby passengers, duped by the employee, are trying to get seats, no one’s being told anything that would imply a change of plans. 8:50, people start forming into lines, I take the head of boarding group two. An employee grabs the PA mic, she’s preparing to speak; is it or doom or our release?

We’ll begin boarding in five minutes.

The lines continue to form, I scan the crowd for my companions and we smile to each other, “I’ll believe it when we’re in toncontín, these brigands would have the nerve to turn back and deposit us here again” I joke nervously. Boarding starts, I find my seat. It’s happening! Jorge sits across the aisle from me, the couple walk by and say “we made it, amigo!”; the businessman smiles, canadude has a crazy-eyed stare but is happy. And there’s a flock of missionary ladies all around me, lugging around pillows, blankets, food and sudoku books in preparation for what an uninformed observant would have assumed was an Australia-bound flight. They start to chatter. I worry they’ll see my Guitar World magazine with Zakk Wylde and Buddy Guy in it as a celebration of the music and values of Satan and, after a prudential time, don my noise-isolating earphones. But all is well, they’re just innocent ladies coming to the third world, oblivious to our over-abundance of churches and the cornucopia of more pressing problems that no amount of voluntourism will change. I repress these critiques, hard to hang out with a human rights activist over the weekend and not think like her a bit. Rush help me wait for lift-off, and it finally happens.

It’s all a smooth, quick deal from there: three hours in the air, Joy as the movie of my choice, a swift exchange explaining the mysteries of the lavatory to my rowmates. Faster than I can digest it, it’s over. We’re in Toncontín, we’ve cleared passport control.

I walk beyond baggage claim without looking back, a pang of curiosity and guilt at abandoning my companions, but I don’t want to linger and make an unnecessary line for customs: I’m desperate to be home. I lie to myself and say I’ll see them when they claim their bags and exit. My dad being late lends credence to this rationalization, but I know that even if I have time to kill, toncontín has always been relaxed about the time its operatives take to put the bags in the carousel, and I fear some bags may have been lost in the long, long wait to be home.

As spontaneously and anonymously as it started, it’s over. I escaped the goodbyes, I missed the chance to finally know their names, to know more about their lives. This was the protracted interaction and spontaneous alliance I only fantasized about when writing about airports as a microcosm of the human vices and virtues, I found to my bliss that even though airlines seek to divide in artificial castes, and security insanity makes everyone hyper-vigilant and wary of strangers, that even though most of the time we only have time to only look after ourselves and make small talk if we even deign to interact with one another, when we’re all stranded, when the artificial divisions and etiquette crumble, at least us hondurans tend to look after one another; and sometimes we’re a little disappointed in the person we least expected: ourselves, because the true colors statement also meant that I was able to see how unwilling I was to help my fellow man if it meant putting my own chance of a good night’s sleep at risk, because I didn’t wait for them, because I never fully let my guard down.

But strangely, I’m also at peace with that. Duress, albeit in such an artificial and safe setting, taught me that even if I’m not as nice as I think is expected of me, people like Jorge and the couple still smile at me, still call me amigo, still tend to that bridge. We’re all imperfect, and have boundaries, and can be tired, and that’s alright: humanity flies with kind people.