The Airport, part 1

Airports are powerful places. They are a flux of movement, where people search, wait, leave, eat, and sometimes sleep. Torrents of people pour through surreally long corridors, and glide along moving strips of floor like products on a conveyor belt. This flux is then stilled to disturbing silence as people sit quietly and wait for their next chance to rush. And nothing seems more empty than an airport terminal waiting for people. Row upon row of empty seats sit silently awaiting occupancy while food bars and coffee shops devoid of activity lie open in wide, barren yawns of stark slumber. Looking back, I see how much airports are similar to the Journey I was walking.

This airport had that empty, insufferable waiting upon it, like a spring wound up tight, yet unable to spring. There was a a hand full of people about: an old man here, a little boy running up and down stairs there, a janitor pushing a floor cleaner. Yet the space they took up was so immense that their feeble attempts at occupancy were absurd and only heightened the since of vacancy and unused potential. It seemed so strange to me that this silent building should exist in a town mad with activity.

So, I was at the air port. This might be a very good thing, except that I had no idea why I was here. But after the chaos I had just inhabited, I frankly felt no need to care. So, wondering into one of the food quarts, I took a seat and enjoyed this silence about me. And quite unexpectedly, I fell asleep.

I dreamt of the sweltering bustle of this now slumbering air port, so mad with activity that the people seemed but fuzzy streaks. I became petrified by their movements, desperate to avoid them, yet constantly finding myself entering their space. Finally running with them to keep up with the stampede, the people became distinct and clear. Yet now the building began to stretch and blur. I began to run faster, an alien compulsion sweeping me, carrying me along. I had to run! It was vital! There was too much to do, to many valuable things to be completed, to much at steak. The personal discomfort was immaterial to the task at hand, and besides, this is the way life IS, no buts about it. My teeth seemed to rattle in my head as I practically flew through the airport. I felt compressed, my muscles constricted and solid, as if I were made of something harder than flesh, my arms and legs spinning mechanically around my torso. It was becoming unendurable: the sounds of human traffic screeching around me, eyes now unable to focus even on the peopl, and my head felt it would split. I…

…woke up with a start. The janitor pushing his floor buffer near me looked at me oddly. His machine, while obviously on, was eerily quiet after my dream; just a whispered promise of brush and fluid. It was hideously quiet. As unendurable as my mad dream rush was, this seemed worse. The airport now seemed to have a menacing ego that starring down at me from its vast ceilings as if hating me for knowing what it had been, and yet for some reason now was not.