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Pleased to Meet YouMore than just a hub of arrivals and departures, the airport is the site of life’s most moving moments.
Illustration: Stéphane Poirier I was stuck in Philadelphia during a weather delay. Hours passed, nerves got frayed, but no more so than when the bartender told us she was closing up. It was 11 p.m. and we had to leave. She sympathized – our flight was nowhere near ready to leave, and it wasn’t late enough to cancel it outright – but she had to close, as did every other bar in the airport. “This is what it must have felt like to live in Toronto,” someone said from the back of the room. And so the bars closed. The food court shut down. The souvenir shops too. Only the newsstands stayed open, and they became a kind of lifeline. To what, I don’t know. To sanity perhaps. To candy. I watched other passengers walk toward their gates or, if they were lucky, toward the baggage claim. I’m the type of person who likes to imagine the lives of complete strangers. In airports, this little game becomes even more interesting. The idea of coming and going is so acute at an airport that it can feel like a condensed version of life. While the airport is as good a place as any to contemplate existential mysteries, it is probably one of the most utilitarian physical spaces we occupy. We are all at the airport for a reason. For a good reason. And sometimes, life in the airport doesn’t even seem real. It’s as if one of the voices over the speakers is saying, “We now interrupt our regular programming.” Airports are terminals of movement. Within them, the world goes about its business, families are reunited and torn apart (if temporarily). I’ve often wondered how many people cry in an airport on a given day. When the people next to you are saying farewell, how long will it be until they see each other again? This is the stuff of real drama, and I’ve been perplexed by the lack of films that take place in airports. I’m not talking about Tom Hanks, “stuck” in an airport in The Terminal (based on the life of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who lived in Paris’ CDG for 18 years). An airport is a transition point in our lives. Very few of us, even those about to embark on their umpteenth business trip of the month, exit an airport the same person as the one who entered it. Travel changes things. For some people, it changes everything. Our airplane finally arrived and we assembled in the departures lounge, feeling tired and lost, just wanting to get on with things. When I finally disembarked, early in the morning, it was almost as if someone had announced, “We now resume our regularly scheduled programming.” I had arrived. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net Frequent flyer Arjun Basu is the former editor-in-chief of enRoute and the author of Squishy, a collection of short stories. abasu@spafax.com |
