Airports

Airports are a sanctity in many ways. An energy...a wide eyed liberation...a beating heart breaking through, a breath inhaled in new fresh air. A soft kiss from a lover you've been missing for weeks, months, years. A grandmother with her eyes welling reaching out for that gratifying grasp. It's peace and rest and boredom. It's an answer to the end of the security line. Uncomfortable black seats, free wi fi, pilots draggin their suitcases behind them on their next journey--so prestige and ironed. It's achy bones and tired eyes. But one thing that I love most about airports is that it's that first moment where you enter a new realm, a new find waiting to be discovered. I notice something different about my hometown everytime I get off a plane and step onto it's announcing cold frigid concrete biting back at my temporary disapearance.

The airport is the only place that I can waste time and not feel guilty. I can get that book finished and I can people watch better than I can even at the downtown mall. I love people so much. I feed off of strangers energy, off of their emotion. I see the weary mom dragging her child behind her trying to find an impossible healthy food choice for her boy. I see a woman dressed to the "t" with beautiful blonde hair down to her back and searching eyes hoping someone will give her a second glance as a reward for her hours of preparedness of the day. I see screaming teenagers exhilerated to run into an old friend traveling to the same destination. I notice the way I feel in an airport, both escape and return. Always there is a lingering anxiety. A livening anxiety at most. But everytime I enter an airport I hope I run into someone I know. Someone that I will recognize. Sometimes my vision expectantly plays tricks on me and everyone looks distincty familiar. That little girl reminds me of my cousin, that beautiful twenty something year old man reminds me of an ex lover. That older woman reminds me of my best friends mom. It always brings me back to the reality that although we are all individuals and rare in every sense of the word we are all somehow someway connected to humanity. <3