I arrive at airports too early on purpose. Like, embarrassingly early. "Are you sure your flight is today?" early.
I've had to defend this. People get weird when you say you enjoy airports. They look at you like you've just admitted to liking the sound of leaf blowers or the taste of airplane wine. The assumption is that you either haven't been to enough airports or your standards need recalibrating.
I know airports are often terrible. The queues, the fluorescent lighting designed to make everyone look slightly dead, the security theatre where you take off your shoes like a person being booked for a crime. I'm not talking about that part.
I'm talking about after. The hour before your flight when all the nonsense is done and you're just... sitting there. Coffee in hand. Watching gates you're not going to. Belonging to no schedule. Having nowhere to be yet.
The airport at 6am is a deeply weird place. A giant room defined entirely by transition, full of people who are currently between lives. Nobody is home. Nobody is at work. Nobody is anywhere, really. We're all just... unlocated. Floating in the liminal soup.
I find this unreasonably relaxing and I cannot fully explain why.
There's a gate I sit near sometimes — Gate 22 — which is always boarding flights to places I'm not going: Oslo, Warsaw, Nairobi, Houston. I drink my coffee and watch people who are about to become different versions of themselves. The person about to land somewhere new. The person going home after six months. The person about to see someone they love for the first time in ages. You can't tell who's who. They're all just standing there with bags, staring at the departure board, vibrating at slightly different emotional frequencies.
At 6am the airport is almost peaceful. Almost zen.
The cafes are quiet. The staff move with the calm of people who've been awake since 4am and have transcended normal human time. The light through the big windows is still that pre-dawn dark blue, runway lights glowing, everything feeling slightly paused — like the day looked at its calendar and thought "eh, five more minutes."
My phone ends up at the bottom of my bag after security. I leave it there. Drink my coffee. Watch the departures board. Think about things loosely, or don't think at all. Both good options.
This is what it feels like to have nowhere to be yet. It's a rare sensation.
Most of life is spent already mid-thing. Already in the meeting, the conversation, the relationship, the day. Always in progress. The airport hour is a gap in the schedule of existing. The day you're flying toward hasn't started. You're not home. You're not there yet. You're just... here. In a chair. With coffee. And that's the whole assignment.
There's a kind of thinking that only happens in these in-between moments. Not productive thinking — the other kind. Where things float up from wherever they've been hiding. Where you notice what you've been feeling because for once nobody is asking you to feel something specific.
I've had some of my clearest thoughts at Gate 22. Nothing life-changing. Just a brief sense of proportion. What matters. What doesn't. The quiet realisation that I'm a person in the middle of a life, and the life is still going, and that's actually fine.
Then the gate opens and everyone stands up and I become someone going somewhere again.
But for that hour? I was just here. Watching everyone else go.
Completely enough.