I look around, the bacon quiche still in one hand, my walking stick in the other. But the difference between the relatively clean food court and the place I was now in? The difference between clean air and polluted air is tangible even to people who don’t take that much notice of it. In a polluted place, it’s more pervasive than anything else after a while you get used to it, but then the fog is in your lungs, making even breathing harder than it should be. In bad places like airports, it smells sterilized and stale, and that goes double for airplanes. It’s like…honestly, it’s like the difference between living in a polluted city like New York – no, scratch that, somewhere really polluted like Hong Kong or Beijing – for a few months and then going somewhere where the air is pure and clean. You think I would have noticed the sun on my skin, but it was the stark difference in the way the wind smelled to me that stood out first. The air smelled strange to me immediately. First: I’m pretty darn sure that a food court doesn’t have grass inside of it, or trees. When I found myself in another world, I picked up on it right away for a number of reasons. Upon reflection, I think I would have rather eaten my quiche instead before I left, but we can’t have everything. Yet it’s one thing to imagine being transported into another dimension or to another world, and quite another thing if it actually happens. I think every boy does, and I never forgot that dream even when I grew older.
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