Layovers of Life

The feeling of relative-relaxation and anticipation while lounging at an airport, waiting for your flight mostly seems sweet to me. Curling up with a book, a coffee, the cabin-bag stashed against your body, now reading the book, now lifting your head out of the book to sip the hot coffee and in that one coffee-moment, capturing the whereabouts around you through your coffee-steam-fogged glasses. Your mind instantly confabulates a hundred different stories--the prim fifties man with the brown leather suitcase, the chirpy 16 year old with pink sneakers listening to her iPod, the mysterious thirty-something woman in her stilettos and red lipstick, the noisy family from Asia, the careless looking serious sexy young man with a slight spiky hairdo and so on. Then taking another sip and getting back into another story that the book tells.
Sometimes airport lounges are the only places where your mind gets time to do recaps. Analyses, introspections and more analyses; just pure unadulterated thinking, planning. You promise yourself to write it down and check it off the list. Unfortunately, you forget it as soon as you get on the plane...or even before that. But it was a realization, wasn't it?
Alone, you tend to begin new conversations. Accompanied, you take the talk deeper. When you are at the mercy of your brain's games, it could be all dangerous but airports are high-security, everywhere. Or, are they?
And then if the sole purpose of your being at the airport is a leisure trip, all of these seem definitely cherishable--the way they're coming back at me right now. I so long to feel that feeling of being at one of those waiting lounges at terminals, reading a little bit of my book, a little bit of faces and sipping my coffee-turning-cool.