The Fence

I was driving around the city late the other night, without a destination in mind, and I found myself magnetised by the site of the old airport, a huge plot of prime land in the heart of residential Athens. Driving at night clears my mind. Somehow the city looks more interesting, more exotic, more familiar at night. Maybe like this I feel less seen, less noticed or exposed, and I can observe around me better, even recognise myself better through the fluorescent street lights. The old airport is a place where I spent endless hours as a child, looking at planes come and go, dreaming of travels, flying, of conquering the world. Back then, to my elementary school friends, I was just a plane nerd, but for me the airport, the planes and the travellers were a symbol of freedom.  

I drove to my favorite plane spotting corner, and stopped right next to the fence, the same fence that used to proudly separate me from my dream of flying high. The whole site is now used as a graveyard for old planes that nobody wants to fly in anymore, and everything around them looks eaten by the years, including the old forbidding fence, which is now covered in graffiti and would fall down with a gentle kick. It all looked quite dark, lonely and sad. But to my eyes nothing had changed, everything looked the same. Maybe I felt that I hadn’t changed, that it was only a day since I last visited this corner 20 years ago. I looked towards the old runway and I could still see the planes flying in so loudly and closely right above me that would make my ears buzz and my hair rise. 

Inside the darkness of my car, I saw myself a few steps away, two decades ago, standing at the same spot, I saw the determined smile of an 11-year old looking at my symbols of freedom through the metal fence. I saw a child, full of dreams and ambitions, thinking if only he could climb over this fence everything would magically come true in a second. I suddenly felt a sense of protection, and I wanted to walk out of the car and talk to this child, to give advice, warnings, tell him what he should expect and what he shouldn’t, what he should work harder on, what he should avoid. I mostly wanted to warn him about the fence, tell him that it is just a fence, and show him the image of the same fence twenty years later. 

Perhaps I even did talk to this child, my double from a different era, because I heard his questions, full of impatience and excitement. “Will I do this? Will I make it there? Will I fly that high?” And before I could answer “Yes, but…” or “It’s not quite that simple”, it occurred to me. I saw it suddenly, that everything I had wished and dreamed for, everything that I had demanded of the fence to stop denying me, had come true, absolutely everything. The only thing that was separating me from the child and his wishes of twenty years ago was the present knowledge that all this has now happened. 

I left with a few tears in my eyes, and looked at the sad fence over my shoulder as I was driving away slowly. The graffiti, the holes, the wire half rotten, my old friend, felt as if he looked back at me and smiled.