air port

A port of air. Taken from places all over the world, carried in the lungs of passengers going here and there and then mingling, only to be taken in again and carried on. Any goods to declare? A few particles of air from Karachi, from Buenos Aires (hope it's good), and from some unkown sources I cannot track down. Oh, and then someone sneezed on me - he sounded Swiss, but I'm not quite certain.
Airports are strange. So many barriers are crumbling in these few hundred square metres of internationality. Even though airports are built right at the heart of a nation (most of the time), they do not really belong, they are spaces of their own. Most people don't really want to be there anyway, especially if they are only in transfer. This bit of earth is only a chair to sit down on until that next aircraft carries you to another place, it doesn't matter whether it is in Yemen or Argentina or the Philippines. It is always day at an airport wherever it is, and yet for some people it is 3am in the morning, for others 2pm in the afternoon. Body clocks tick very differently here. It is a space filled with empty hours of waiting, with goodbyes and expectations sloshing in from either side. And it's all about mingling and meeting and crashing, air and languages and world views and consumption and culture. My own little identity is in the midst of this, gaping and wondering at all these possibilities.


* Thoughts from Doha, Qatar, when my body clock told me it was about time to switch my brain off and sleep...