Hey, it’s me, Sarah. Did you miss me? Welcome back to Note to Self, a newsletter where I talk about whatever I want. Today, it’s the airport — a place I love against all logic.
I am sitting in the Copenhagen airport, waiting to board my flight home to New York. I got here so early that I couldn’t even check my bag yet, but that’s fine by me because I love the airport. To be fair, European airports are generally much nicer than American ones, but I love all airports, even the ugly ones. Even soulless Seattle-Tacoma, and tiny Myrtle Beach, and terrifying Denver International.
The airport is a departure not just from where you are physically, but also psychologically and spiritually. It is a true liminal space. You are neither home nor away; your trip has not begun or ended. All roads narrow at this border. Timezones and circadian rhythms collapse, and in their absence, our most primitive and chaotic whims are revealed. The usual rules of public behavior are immediately irrelevant and the illusion of control over our daily lives is pulled from us. At the airport, your world is fixed to one terminal. You are powerless and prostrate to whatever airline, and God, you pray to.
That’s what this is about, for me: control. In real life, I want to be in control all the time. Not just of myself, but of my future, how people perceive me, and the effect I have in the world. I want to be a bastion of discipline: to say the right things at the right times, charm everyone, never cause harm, dress perfectly for every occasion, and always pick the right restaurant. I think a lot of people feel this way — sing along if you know the words! But the pressure I feel, self-imposed and otherwise, to get everything right frays my nerves and wears at the gears of my mind. And it’s impossible, obviously. This is why I like the airport.
At the airport, nothing is real and everything is wrong so you can give up on all that stupid shit, at least for a couple of hours. You can forget about your health-conscious real life, your moral high ground on Starbucks, and every last shred of concern for how people perceive you. You can shrug off the burden of control.
This place is an exercise in surrender. At least once in your life, you will have to submit to the humiliation of pleading with strangers to pass them in the security line. Your shoes must come off and your preferred toothpaste, shampoo, and body lotion will be revealed to onlookers. Deadeyed TSA personnel are prepared to swipe their latex gloves down the ass seam of your pants if your button-fly sets off the metal detector. Mine did, by the way. Your dining options are limited and bad. In the end, you may just spend $57 on deep-fried mozzarella and a glass of white wine with someone else’s lipstick on the rim. Oh, one more thing: Your flight is very full, and the suitcase you fastidiously packed to avoid checking luggage? You’re probably going to have to check it at the gate.
Surrender, surrender, surrender — to discomfort, to yourself, to the airport. You are intimately visible to thousands of people, but it doesn’t matter. No one cares! You can have a beer with your breakfast and buy a romance novel with a mortifying title. You can dress for radical, heinous comfort. You can sleep on what is essentially a public bench with your mouth open and your hands in the waistband of your pants.
To be clear, the airport is not a “judgment-free zone.” Quite the contrary. You are free to be wildly judgemental here, or to practice gracious compassion. And at the airport, while you get extra points for compassion, you do not get dinged for your silent disapproval, whithering looks, or even your unsociable attitude. This is because, as we all know, the airport is where Earth’s most alarmingly stupid people go to exercise their God-given right to be alarmingly stupid. If we began keeping careful score of the bad behavior at the airport, we’d need to invent bigger numbers.
And so who cares if people judge you for eating McDonald’s in a neck pillow, or for how you look sprinting to your gate in sandals? You can do whatever you need to do here, except leave your bag unattended or transport powders, lithium batteries, more than 3.4 ounces of moisturizer, and some other things.
Of course, you can buy status in an attempt to retain some scrap of comfort and dignity — lounge access, TSA pre-check, Global Entry. You can bypass the security line without taking off your shoes and sit in your little lounge. But you still spent an unbelievable amount of money on dry chicken, just like everyone else here. And you can’t speed up the overworked wifi, prevent your flight from being delayed, or stop the iPad children next to you from screaming. You can buy status, but you can’t buy control. Not at the airport.
And yet, for all its stress and strain and ugliness, there is something darkly beautiful about how people behave in these circumstances. When they have nothing left to give, not even their pride. Years ago, I saw a woman get denied boarding at her gate. Something about miscalculated covid entry results, back in those days. She stumbled away with shining eyes and a chin visibly shaking under her mask. She was mumbling, “Bad bitches don’t cry, bad bitches don’t cry, bad bitches don’t cry.” What an embarrassing and endearing public display of failure. How horrifically human. (The woman was me.)
There’s tenderness, here, too. In every airport in the world, you can find children using their parents’ thighs as pillows and nocturnal flight attendants calling everyone “honey.” There are young men lifting bags for old ladies. There is a border control agent attempting human emotion by telling a visibly distraught woman, “It’s okay. Sometimes life is…um…things happen?” (The woman was, once again, me.)
Hell is other people and so is heaven. You can meet both at the airport, where the entire human experience has been compressed into a maze of concrete and linoleum. You can observe rage, anguish, and cringe alongside patience, generosity, and resilience. You can eat a stale donut and silently seethe. You can contemplate your mortality as you purchase Gas-X. You can cry.
And of course, there is the ancient tradition of exchanging sexually charged eye contact with every person in striking distance of your age. You may ask yourself, “How can I be attracted to every man in this terminal and none of the ones on Hinge?” It’s because every feeling is possible at the airport, even, against truly stunning odds, carnal desire.
Despite my track record of crying at the airport, I do take pains not to. That’s why I arrive so early. I want to drift through crowds of stressed-out people without succumbing to the stress myself. I want to offer strangers my patience like it’s free. I want to be kind to myself and others and feel a little superior about it. Of course, you can go in front of me. Here, you dropped this. Let me grab you an extra bin for your small personal items. And once I’m utterly high on my ability to remain calm, I want to plant myself in the restaurant nearest my gate, neck a very cold pinot grigio, and people-watch. I want to open my laptop and wax poetic about this strange, terrible place and why I love it so goddamn much.
I’m still writing this from the Copenhagen airport. I’ve checked my bag and made it through security and immigration. Now I’m eating a hot dog at my gate, thinking about how lucky I am to be alive. I always get this way at airports. Well, that’s not true. I am always this way but at the airport, I surrender to my base impulse (that of a deeply earnest sap) and allow myself to find extra sentimentality in the pedestrian.
The juxtaposition strikes me. Judging and being judged, the stupidity and ingenuity of strangers, the banal, dirty, plastic accouterment surrounding one of the most technically and existentially humbling things humans can do — fly.
How lucky we are to be humbled in this way: to arrive at the airport with somewhere to go, to land and clamber into the arms of loved ones. We are so lucky to lay sore, kinked necks on soft pillows after long flights. We are so lucky to encounter discomfort by choice when so many people in the world encounter far worse without choice.
Soon, we’ll be boarding. People will stand and crowd around the entrance well before their boarding groups have been called. People will place their luggage in overhead bins that are not theirs. And then we’ll all sit down and watch movies over each others’ shoulders. Or maybe we’ll scroll through our own photos to remember our real lives, which feel so far away now. I myself will be staring into the middle distance and wondering if the man in 22A is actually attractive or just able to lift a large carry-on like it’s nothing. We’ll taxi for too long on the tarmac. The air will become hot and stale.
And then, as 380 tons of metal shudder and then heave off the ground, that eerie hush will fall over the plane. Everything is roaring, except for the humans. We are uncomfortable and annoyed and annoying. But right now we are all thinking, even if just for a second, about death. About our smallness, and the risks we take each day to go where we want to go and do the things we are lucky to do. We’ll share just one breath of this. Fear and gratitude in equal measure. One deep exhale of surrender. And then we’ll return to everything else, all the other feelings that exist outside the airport.
xx,
Sarah
Okay this is one of my favorite things I’ve read on this app - I have also always felt this way about airports and haven’t been able to put a finger on why. Being forced to release control when I otherwise seek to control every other part of my life is def the reason. I agree with everything you said except Sea-Tac being soulless but maybe that’s just because I’m a Seattle native 🙏 bravo!
Dropping this in for consideration.... my cousin met his now wife on a plane 🫠.