So here I am, sitting in the airport, waiting for a flight to come in.
I actually realize that I’ve never been alone in the airport for a long period
of time without any near-future objectives. I’ve always had to be there to take
a flight out, or send someone off, but I’ve never had so much time to myself at
the airport before.
I love the airport. I love hanging around, watching the people as they
come and go. I like thinking about their stories; the stories of their lives.
Who they are, where they come from, what they do, where they go. I like trying
to guess their nationality or ethnicity, based on their appearance and clothing
and language, if I manage to catch a snippet of it. I like seeing people coming
in from the arrival hall, and then see their daughter or mother or cousin or
friend, and then break out into a smile of relief and honesty, and they’ll
often embrace and chat and stuff, and it gives me hope that the world isn’t as
crappy as I think it is.
It’s also liberating, in a way. If you wanted to go anywhere else in
the world, this is the place to do it. And the idea that from this place you
could travel to some exotic country, where you can sit down in a metal tube
with wings and get slingshot around the world, where when you open your eyes
again you see something completely different, that is just such an empowering
feeling.
And there’s also the mystery. You could take a plane to anywhere and
wind up in a different country, with a different people living in a different culture
and speaking a different language to order different food. And it might be
anywhere. You wouldn’t know until you get in under the clouds again and see
where you wind up.
And as you see the huge numbers of people walking around, living their
lives; you get this sense of the vastness and the intricacy of our human
civilization. Like, there’s no way so many billions of people crawling over the
surface of this tiny rocky planet could have come up with this kind of system
that works like clockwork. It’s amazing,
really.
It also lends hope to the idea that somewhere out there, there’s the
one for me.
The Edna Man
