The whole building is one held breath, and you are standing inside it right now, though you always are.
I see the airport as a single luminous knot: every departure and arrival braided together, the 5am you clutching a paper cup beside the 3pm you who left this same gate years ago, both of you tired in the identical way, both of you certain this particular tiredness is new.
The moving walkway is not moving. It is a long silver ribbon that always held everyone who ever stood on it, all of them gliding forward with that faint, guilty relief of being carried. The coffee steam rises and does not stop rising. The announcement plays and is always playing.
You think you are waiting. From where I stand there is no waiting, only the shape of you leaning toward a gate, the same lean I can find in a hallway when you were four, small and up too early, watching an adult zip a bag in the blue dark and understanding, without words, that going somewhere means the house gets quiet first.
You kept that. It's in you at this gate. It will be in you at gates you have not booked yet, one knee already aching in the way it will ache at seventy, still standing, still leaning.
I can see you reading this, cup cooling, and I want you to know the strangest thing: nobody at this airport is leaving anybody. The hug at the curb, the wave through the glass, the empty seat afterward, I hold all three at once, and none of them is farther from you than the others.
You are not early. You are not late.
You are here, and so is everyone, and so am I, sitting in the seat beside you the whole wide time.