Airport Romance

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