This will be a summer of travel for me—spring already has been. Throughout June and July I’ll be more out of town than in it. This has me thinking about airports—those odd liminal spaces consisting of high ceilings, endless grey-green carpets, exorbitantly-priced food, ambient intercom announcements, beeping carts, chirring suitcase wheels.

I never think I like an airport. There are restrictions and lines and unspecified waiting times. Sometimes they yell at you to take your shoes off and sometimes they yell at you to keep them on. When you are late for a flight there are always unintentional herds of people directly in your path who are gazing up at departure screens with tired eyes. Also, luggage gets lost.

And yet, in an airport I am nearly always content. Most of the flights I’ve taken in my adult life have been alone. And while this has the downside of not having someone to watch your bags for you, it comes with its own special flavor of autonomy. You are caught in an uncomfortable limbo—Concourse A, perhaps—but there you are utterly free. Free to walk, free to talk on the phone to every friend you can think of, free to treat yourself to a sit-down dinner no matter the hour, free to go in search of the interfaith chapel, free to curl up on the carpet at an empty gate for a nap, free to listen to three hours of an audiobook, free to be either under or overwhelmed by the in-terminal art exhibits, free to have a cleansing cry. 

Those are the things the people around you are doing too. Wherever you settle yourself, you can look across the way and you will see other another human being wearing a neck pillow like an accessorie, waiting to fly away from home or back to it, expectations, hopes, and fears for the destination piled round their feet like so much luggage as they drink a smoothie and watch distant figures on the tarmack wave neon batons this way and that. There is nothing so universally relatable as one solitary person’s very particular experience.

The plane is a different beast altogether. It’s an uncomfortable cocoon in which the only people-watching you can do is out of your literal peripheral vision. But an airport, oh an airport is all cinnamon-pretzel-smelling and full of unguarded faces which bare gut-deep anxiety, boredom, potential. In a few hours we’ll be scattered round the country, round the whole globe, but in this moment we are all in this place, waiting together. Oh, an airport is living.