Leonard Runnebaum

Mr. Davis

English L&L

14.10.2022

English Summative

02.50am J.W. Marriott Airport Hotel Frankfurt, 3hr until take-off.

The loud barking sound which is also known as an iPhone alarm annoys me every time,

searching for the volume bars at the rim of the phone to mute the penetrating sound. As I look

up, 02:50 am, 2hr until take off. The most difficult part of the morning is to stand up knowing

it’s not 10am in the morning, seeing the sun standing at the top of the bright blue sky and the

second step to overcome is the ice cold thirty second wait in front of the shower waiting for

the warm water to come. Making myself ready and packing my things together in the middle

of the night feels weird because you automatically reduce the possibility of loud noises being

created and when you’ve packed your stuff together you’ll take a last walk over the twenty

year old Hotel carpet, searching for any left belongings you’ll look at the clock standing on

the bed table and see that is way to early.

03:15am Frankfurt Airport, 1hr and 35min until take-off.

As I’m casually walking through the empty corridors and now and then people passing me in

an accelerated walk and airport staff pushing a ton of the roller carts that get used for carrying

luggage fill this so empty space with noise.

My advantage to several other people is that I’m only carrying cabin luggage and I'm already

checked in which saves a lot of time.

Walking under this twenty meter long and ten meter high manual flight board always feels

special when I’m flying from Frankfurt, additionally its the reminder that the security check

is near to come.

03:30am Frankfurt Airport security check, 1hr and 20min until take-off.

There's one huge single to two person line that winds through the, due to the pandemic closed

down, food court which shouldn’t be a problem to me as I’ve booked the fast lane ticket for

my flight. Walking past all of the other waiting people feel weirdly incorrect. As I enter the

priority and special needs portal that checks the passports I get called out loud and smuggling

“Stopp” asif I were to breach into the National Bank. The women came running to me and

explained or instructed me that the Fast lane opens at 06:00am and that it wouldn’t be

possible for me to go through because everybody else would have to wait as well. This is the

last thing that should’ve gone wrong and now I’ll have to walk all the way back, possibly

miss my plane and have the biggest walk of shame, and all that in the complete middle of the

night.

03:50am Frankfurt Airport security check, 1hr until take-off.

About twenty people to go, until I’ve surpassed the point I had originally bought the ticket

for, hindered from using by the bureaucratic handling of the airport staff. At this point I began

to see the actual line to the security check. A hundred meter long security check hall had

roughly fifteen to twenty security check stations and there were two open on the right side

and one open on the left side. The lines were absurde, the right line went up and down thirty

meter six times packed with a four people width in addition the cabin luggage. The left line
was a third of the right one but it was way slower. I saw a staff member that went nervously

up and down and looked like he would let an young adult pass through this huge line at the

start of his shift, convinced of myself I walked up to him and before I could even start to say

something “nein” shot out of his mouth which I had to say left me speechless so he simply

walked off.

04:20am Frankfurt Airport security check, 30min to take-off.

Being Almost in the front row had a relief, there were only thirty people in front of me and

and Boarding has just started. The last meter of this line felt like ages, would have the

constant thought of your flight in mind; How far is the gate? Are there other passengers that

are late? Will they at least call me out? When repeating these questions, I felt like a boat

captain driving into the dark swollen sea.

04:40am Frankfurt Airport Gangways, 10min to take-off.

Hustling through the so, so empty duty free store with my backpack jumping up and down

like a point moving on the y-axis of a running graph. Running past these empty guided paths,

empty shelves, empty stores and empty checkouts conveys and emotional emptyness.

Officially my gate was closing, I was at gate G14, 16 more to go. On the left side were

uneven numbers and on the right side were the evens, most of the people were in a rush as

well, families standing next to the toilet exit waiting for the last member to join and other

families stressed full of panic, only to reach their flight for a relaxing time.

04:50am Frankfurt Airport Gate Thirty, 0min to take-off

I reached the gate too late, the time was up and the plane was planned to start, no callout,

nothing. There was the plane, all passengers waiting for the gate to open, there was no
scheduled opening time to open. So I simply set down on the thirty year old filthy chairs and

stained at the newest Ukraine war terror report.

06:00am Frankfurt Airport Gate Thirty, flight canceled.

PART2

For my creative piece of writing in which I chose to write a story about the stress of catching

a flight in which I implemented real life problems that were based on a true story. I’ve used

several rhetorical techniques and structural similarities from Carol Ann Duffy by referencing

several poems and especially “The Ex Ministers”, “The Mistletoe Bride” and “Backstage”.

While writing this negative story, I wanted to implement rhetorical devices that I recognized

in the poem when reading them in class. The storys superficial theme is the lack of time,

constant stress and time pressure. I decided to choose a number as a symbol that can be

implemented very often throughout the story and which is an antithesis to the whole story.

Thirty would have to be the number, I always tried to write it out so it’s not just a number.

Thirty stands for finding your equilibrium and balance which was simply not thought of in

the story. I got inspiration from “The Mistletoe Bride” as the complete poem is a Symbol and

reference of a known horror story.

When writing I wanted to let the reader be able to experience and be in the scenario, to have a

more descriptive writing I’ve used Similes to better describe the scene, for example when

talking about the unanswered questions or the backpack moving up and down when running.

This was linked to “The Mistletoe Bride” as Duffy made the Groom searching feel real with

her descriptive writing. This is why I’ve added an anaphora to the 4:40am paragraph which
makes the statement more descriptive and interesting and determined. This technique can also

be seen in several poems of Duffy like “I am my…” in “Backstage or “Your Mother…” in

“Auden Comes Through At The Seance”. “Emptiness” the word used for my anaphora had a

deeper meaning as it should be a symbol for everything being bad in the present world and

“emptiness” creates this dark depressed emotion that I tried to convey.

When ending the Story, I wanted to stop abruptly. I took inspiration of Duff’s poem endings,

as she often ends of her poems with one separated ending line like for example in

“Backstage”, “The Ex Ministers” and “Auden Comes Through At The Seance” she

summarizes the complete theme of the written pieces and ends it of at once. In conclusion I

did that by taking the heading of every paragraph and made it the ending line.

When starting to plan my story I researched about the “why” behind each of her Poems. I

read that many of her poems were based on a real life story only with the addition of a few

imaginary ideas that spice up the story. So I took a real life experience and created a story

with a deeper meaning, the story should only accompany the actual reasoning behind it. This

is often seen in Duffy's poems like “Backstage” in which there’s an insight into a scene of an

excited (predictably) girl that describes her thoughts, but Duffy packs deeper interpretable

reasoning behind it and that is what I wanted to create with this story.

When writing the Story I found my story too wordy so I chose to cut off the transitional

words that lead from one occasion to another. I did this by creating a time and possibly a new

location for every paragraph and it was all the way a new scene. This idea came from the

poem “The Mistletoe Bride”, no stanza is directly continuing the last one but every thing is

the same story.

A dark tunnel, this is what I wanted to create with the story, a consecutive negative and

depressing story line. My plan was to write an atypical story and I’ve combined this with the
constant criticism of the politics that were addressed in “The Ex Ministers”. By writing about

day to day real life problems we have to accept, I had the compulsion of somehow

implementing all these problems like the closed security checks due to the lack of staff, the

bureaucratic decision making when there’s an existing fast lane ticket but it’ll be accepted

only at a specific time, the common impedance of state employees, the delay of almost every

transportation, product/service and lastly the implementation of the Ukraine War which is

THE topic in every news channel in Germany, ending it of with the cancellation of the flight.

This is what I’ve used to create this dark tunnel that has no end insight and to produce this

negative and hopefully interesting product.