The Airport

An airport is one of the crucial infrastructures in modern transportation systems, serving as a vital hub for the movement of people, goods, and services both domestically and internationally. Yet, the thought of an airport for me is not only about infrastructure; it is rooted deeply inside my heart as a reflective experience.

It carries me back to my childhood years, when my father’s frequent journeys for work filled our home with both excitement and absence. For every trip, it means my own journeys consisting of two visits to the airport, where I would see my father off and welcome him home days later. It was a small airport in a small city, where people could freely watch the planes from nearby fields, only separated by a thin iron fence. I would watch the planes my father boarded take off and refuse to go home until they settled above the sky. Even I could feel the air was loaded with fuel as the plane took off. Then, the airport simply becomes a symbol of saying hello and goodbye.

An airport, for me, was a place where planes take off and land — a gateway for travel and connection. It was a liminal space — neither here nor there, but somewhere in between. It's not about meeting or losing someone, but somewhere in between. I could imagine children like me, or a wife, waiting for those loved return. Sometimes it carries joy, the joy of meeting someone you love, or simply, as a child, the joy of waiting for souvenirs your parents once promised. But sometimes, the storms and rains felt heavier, the water and thunder drops while our prayers for our loved one's safety fly above the clouds. I have felt that restlessness too, of waiting for someone as the plane has not landed yet. It teaches that every arrival begins with a departure, every departure a promise to return. 

As I myself have traveled much more in recent years, the airport has become something even more personal — a space where departures no longer mean loss or reunion, but it marks the beginning of a new journey. It was 3 years ago, when I stepped my feet on the airport felt like stepping on a button. The button would switch everything I have seen and experienced into something new, unfamiliar, unknown, and distant. Life is no longer comforting; it is a new adventure, sometimes it's threatening while exciting, where things are beyond seen. It was the beginning of a new life.

I got a new meaning for departing, "living here and now, there is no going back".

While some people could simply pay a lot more for going back, but not for me :D

The new life brings so much to learn, I never expected would gain as I entered the departing gate. If the airport smelled like fuel before, it now smells like fresh blooming Lily, a quiet morning — tender, luminous, almost sacred. Lily, a symbol of rejuvenation, where one past life ended, and a new soul enters. An airport becomes a place where new lives begin.

To think about it, the airport still is a liminal space. A place in between the past and future, a place that marks a metamorphosis. Now, every time I visit an airport, I see my own "shadows". I believe that in a massive airport, there is someone on their way to a new life. Nervous, terrified, yet excited, like a quiet morning.

An airport is not merely a point of departure — it is the architecture of possibility.

Here, lives are momentarily suspended between what is known and what is yet to be. 

The air hums with longing: greetings into farewells. 

Every gate opens to both an ending and a beginning.

To walk through an airport is to be reminded that movement itself is an act of faith — that one must first let go to arrive.

To walk through an airport is to walk through the gate of transition.

Every gate, every announcement, carries the hum of renewal — a reminder that every journey forward rewrites who we are.

Here, lives pause only to begin.

And there is still more to become.

Airport, shall we see againn??