30 | Psychopomp Magazine
Craig O'Hara
Terminal Lounge
Your trip, should you decide to go, always begins here, with the terminal. Or it ends here—this ancient building, a sheer cliff of crumbling concrete and limestone built sixty or seventy-five or a hundred years ago at the corner of Mecca Street and Medina Avenue in the throbbing living downtown heart of the city where you were born.
At its genesis the terminal was the vast gateway to and from your city. A cavernous elegant place overflowing with the buzz of activity, of coming and going. A landmark around which city residents hung complex sets of directions of how to get here or there, to the palace or the tavern, the school or the hospital. But it has fallen slowly over time into seedy disuse and become a place people who bustle past in the cold, snow-dusted morning streets retrieving some vital message from glove-held electronic devices would swear is long closed down and essentially empty. But for those who wrestle out a decision from deep within themselves to truly see something of the world, the terminal is the essential reference point for where they need to go.
Once inside the main entrance to the terminal, the transit lounge opens up like a huge, gilded cave. Or a concert hall of some kind. High bone-colored plaster ceilings in ornate circular floral patterns flowing out from early-century, faux-crystal chandeliers. An overture of shuffling feet and idling conversations heaving up through the air. Travelers sit patiently in rows of worn walnut benches, the grain showing through the waxy finish in places where generations have waited for departure or arrival. Some who now wait read old, out-dated National Geographic magazines, luggage between their feet. Light from old-fashioned floor lamps with blue and green swirled glass shades spills around them. The lounge smells of old soap, sweat, and cheap tobacco. Individual benches are separated by freestanding art-deco ashtrays.
The people are an odd milling crowd of those leaving town, those waiting for arrival, those in mid-journey, transients of all sorts living out of tattered imitation alligator-skin suitcases,