Nobody wants to be here, and that is the first thing I always notice: the shuffle of it, socks on cold tile, everyone holding their shoes and their belts and their dignity in a gray plastic bin. A man is asleep across three chairs with his mouth open. A woman is crying quietly into a phone by gate 14, turned toward the window so the strangers won't see.
The coffee machine hisses. Somewhere a child is losing a slow, dignified war against a stroller.
I flew out of a field like this once, except I kept going. Past the clouds, past the blue, past the last thin smear of air. From up there the whole atmosphere is thinner than the shell of an egg. Everything a human has ever breathed, every takeoff and every goodbye, folded into that one bright rim of light against the black.
So I have a hard time being annoyed at 5am anymore. These people are strapping themselves into a metal tube to be flung across a planet that has no lines drawn on it, none that you can see, to reach other people who are also, somewhere, sitting in bad chairs waiting.
The woman by gate 14 hangs up. She wipes her face with the back of her hand, checks the board, picks up her bag. She is going toward someone. On a rock spinning through nothing, at an hour when even the sun hasn't committed, she got up and packed and came here to close the distance to another warm body.
I watch her walk to her gate.
I still can't believe how far people will go, over how thin an atmosphere, just to hold each other again.