Airports

I dreamt this like it was a memory, or a movie I’ve watched a thousand times. It’s been playing on repeat for awhile, so I decided to write it and give it a permanent life.
My mind works visually, and I don’t always have the words to properly display an image or a scene that I’m looking at. But I’ve found that if I can at least try, it helps me.

I love you all 💋

There’s a certain kind of architecture that exists nowhere else. Not in churches, not hospitals, not even in the lobbies of hotels where lovers begin and end their journeys in miniature.

The airport is its own country. It has its own solar system. Its own timezone. Its own bylaws and infrastructure. Fluorescent and brutally honest and merciless, it spotlights everything you’re used to keeping soft.

You know the drive there by heart. The exits, the merge lanes, the particular way the sky reveals itself at the terminals. Your hands are easy on the wheel, and that ease is a special lie to yourself.

Arrivals is the happy place. The place harboring possibilities and excitement and glee. The people waiting there have an overflowing quality to them. They’re checking their phones, they drift toward the exit, unsure of their placement. They look up every time a car approaches.

And when the right car does, and you’re met with the face you’ve had to survive by with the crumbs of photos and texted words for weeks, something in the area shifts. Suddenly you are the main act without realizing you were on display. You both rush to each other and hold tightly to something you thought could only exist in the wildest of someone else’s dreams.

You kiss. Your first real actual kiss, on display for an audience of weary travelers and other lovers meeting for the first time.

And you’re envied and celebrated by them all.

Airports hold this sanctitude and precious eggshell of firsts.

And also lasts.

Or maybe just pauses.
Lingering grey plains of waiting, until the next time your skin can touch.

Departures exist cruelly in the same space as the hope in arrivals do.

There is a merciless mocking in how ordinary it all looks. The same walls dare to secure you. The same coffee that was forgiven for its failure now mocks you in its flavor. The same announcements overhead, detached and procedural.

You say goodbye in the car. You remove the bags from the trunk and the sky opens up and dares to compete with your tears. And you’re standing under a rain that feels like a sign from the sunny skies that you are making a mistake.

And there is a moment where both of your hands are touching the same suitcase handle as if it’s the only thing keeping you upright. A moment where the ordinary mechanics of goodbye have to somehow contain something they were never designed to hold. The hug is too long and not long enough. Tears fall onto the lips of a kiss that is never meant to say anything other than,

I am here.

There is always something left unsaid, and both of you know it, and neither of you says it. All you can say is I love you. The same phrase you have repeated every other minute for days now feels heavy as stones and holds more meaning than it ever has.

This evading of other words is its own kind of conversation.

You watched them go through the doors the last time. And now it’s your turn. You mouth the words I love you over and over from the curb while their car becomes just another car in a line. Leaving you with your lips not knowing what to taste anymore. Your hands no longer feeling necessary.

The distance has already begun its quiet work.

How can one building, one built on the faith that we can be held safely in the sky among the clouds, be so giving and also so thieving. Arrivals and Departures, sharing walls and escalators and the same recycled air. Joy and grief as neighboring rooms.

You ride the elevator between them.

What the airport understands, that most places do not, is that love is measured in distance. That wanting someone to stay and being glad they came are the same feeling wearing different clothes. That the anticipation of arrival and the dread of departure are not opposites.

They are the same ache, timed differently.

Their car pulls away from the curb and merges back into traffic and you are already counting. Not consciously. But the number is there, somewhere. The number of days, the number of weeks, the number of times you will look at your phone before the next time you find yourself at another airport. You hold the number in your chest like a shell found by a child on the shore.

Hopeful and delicate.

The drive home after an arrival is long in the best way. Time moves slowly and allows the love in that car to be nurtured and felt with every mile. Hands are never parted and kisses are shared at every stoplight.

The drive home after a departure is long in the sad way. There isn’t a hand to hold and there won’t be for a long while. At every stoplight, you touch your lips so they’re less alone. Your fingers hold the wheel like it’s the only thing maintaining your balance. You struggle to sit in the silence that your sobs interrupt. You try music, but every song says,

Turn back around, you fool. You left your heart on that curb and you’re moving in the wrong direction.

The airport knows things about you that most people never will. It has seen you at your most undone and your most luminous. Your most overfilled and your most empty.

It keeps no record, and it keeps every record. Every arrival, every departure, every careful goodbye is pressed into its indifferent floors.

You hope to approach arrivals again soon. You don’t know when, but that hope is all that you have so you hold it with the tenderest of hands so its chest is free to breathe. But with every arrival, you know there is a departure waiting. You hope the next arrival is as exciting as the last and that the pending departure never tints that excitement in a color that takes away from how brilliant it is.

Some places hold us whether we want them to or not. The airport doesn’t care. It never has. That’s not its job. And somehow that’s the most comforting thing about it. It has held everyone in the same way. With stability and strong arms. Watching you cry and laugh and fall apart and come together. Every longing looks the same under the light of an airport.

You’re never truly alone inside of one. But it’s the place that can make you feel the loneliest when it’s what watches you say goodbye to someone you’re never meant to part with.

Some places hold us whether we want them to or not.

You learn this slowly. Then all at once. Then every time.