When you travel in an airport alone

 You can get away with more when you travel alone in an airport. You're surrounded by hundreds of other people, talking, moving, breathing, smiling, crying. Their lives touch yours for a second, bouncing into your periphery and then out again, as you do to theirs. You've been traveling for days, for minutes, for hours. Time is fluid, it doesn't exist, not in a place like this. Your body clock is off and you don't know what time it is anymore. It could be breakfast time, it could be dinnertime, it could be high noon. The light coming form the window helps little. You've been traveling across time zones at this point, and who really cares, anyway?

When you're traveling alone in an airport, you can sit by yourself on the ground. You can put your iced coffee on the small table next to you, pull out your laptop, and type away. You can watch the mobile that outlines the history of flight as it spins over the sushi-bar. There are blimps, and the space station, a model of the Wright's airplane, and a blue and gold hot air balloon. You can listen to the pianist as he plays, wondering what song he's playing this time but feeling like maybe you should know it. You can smile with him from afar as his tip jar slowly fills from the generosity of strangers and get lost with him as he closes his eyes and his nostrils flare, trying to capture the emotion and drama of it all. You can watch the pianist covertly, when you're alone at the airport. You can simply sit without consulting anyone else or having to worry about someone else's amusement. 

The pianist's bubble is bigger than the others here. Certainly bigger than yours from where you sit in the quiet with your laptop. He's touching everyone who sits nearby, who walks past him, and especially those who stop to talk to him. His hair falls over his forehead and into his eyes while he plays, looking a little older than he is, but as soon as someone stops to talk to him, he looks up and smiles, his boyish face matching his light blue bowtie. He changes the landscape around him with every note, as people flow past him like a river, some sitting on the far bank listening, and others standing near by, being more honest about their enjoyment. 

When you're traveling alone in the airport, you don't have to worry about your younger sibling crying, or someone needing food, or making sure you find a bathroom for your companion. There is no discussion about what food to get, or where to meet up, or even if it is time to take a break, stand up, and stretch our legs. You are your own master when you travel in an airport, deciding where you're going, and how you get there. Whether you will rush through it all, head down, closed off from everyone else. Whether you will meander through with your head up, paying attention to the life around you, making faces at small children, and winking at their parents. Or maybe you decide to find a comfortable place to sit and work on your computer for after all, this trip is for business, not pleasure, and the airport has free WiFi. Maybe this trip is one that has you spending too much money at the airport bar as you wait for your flight away from home...or maybe back to it. 

It is too easy to miss the joy of life in the bustle, when you're traveling alone in an airport. It's too easy to dismiss other's business for their own, or feel isolated and alone in this cacophony of bright lights and voices over the intercom. But maybe that is the beauty of traveling alone in the airport. For once you might be safe here, the safest you've ever been. No one judges you, when you travel alone in the airport. So sit on the floor, sip the ridiculously overpriced coffee, watch the cute pianist, eavesdrop on the couple breaking up over the phone, and enjoy it.