8 Things You Notice After Living at the Airport for Three Days

A missed flight, two unexpected nights, and a closer look at a world in transit

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Soaring ceilings. Heartfelt goodbyes. The sterile shimmer of terminals where some are leaving their lives behind and others are dragging their tired bodies home.

In the coming days, I would get to know an airport intimately.

Let’s back up though.

Earlier that afternoon, I’d left my Mexico City hotel, where I’d spent the past two weeks. In the taxi to the airport, the trip replayed in flashes: dinner inside a cave; the climb up one hundred pyramid steps for a panoramic view of ancient ruins; full, glorious meals for less than five dollars.

When I reached the terminal, the man checking my ticket asked for a small white paper. Apparently, it was mandatory for boarding.

My mind went immediately to the card I’d been handed after my red-eye flight into Mexico City. The one I’d groggily signed and… left sitting on my hotel nightstand. Ugh.

“You can get a new one at the immigration office,” he said. “It’s a twenty-minute walk from here.”

I did not make my flight.

The next available flight wouldn’t leave until Sunday. So, for the next two nights, the CDMX airport would become my temporary dwelling. I’d stay at the hotel attached to the terminal, then fly to Denver for a ten-hour layover before making my way home to San Francisco.

And so began the first page of The Airport Diaries. Over the next three days, I found myself asking:

What is the essence of an airport?

Day 1

1) Airports are places of comfortable anonymity

Pacing the airport, I pass a man napping across three seats, his arms wrapped around his suitcase as though it’s a stuffed animal. Long gray hair spills over a blue sweatshirt folded into a makeshift pillow. He does not look out of place.

I, too, look disheveled. Hair unkempt. Sweater clashing with my pajama pants. But I blend right in. It’s one of the quiet mercies of airports — you can be rumpled, glazed over, barefoot, frantic, half-asleep, or crying into a breakfast sandwich at 6:12 a.m., and no one will question it.

2) Airports are in-between spaces

As I power-walk through the terminal, I realize airports give a pleasant sensation of suspension between chapters.

Something like peace.

The relief of being outside the usual demands of place and routine.

The world narrows. I like the feeling.

3) Airports are places of chance encounters

Though my appetite is minimal, I decide to eat anyway. Foam clings to my beer glass in the shape of an old man’s face, complete with a Rip Van Winkle beard sweeping down one side.

Nearby, a man chats up a woman at the airport bar.

“How are the garlic fries?” he asks. “Texture-wise, are they up to par?”

The conversation is mundane, but I smile at the two separate journeys, briefly brushing shoulders.

Jonny Sun wrote:

“Airports make everyone feel like a passer-through, like a visitor, like an outsider, and this is comforting in its honesty because aren’t we always, always just visitors, just passer-through?”

At sixteen, I connected with a young Boston musician on a flight home from a writing camp in Connecticut. I remember the thrill of that conversation: the freedom of trading real pieces of yourself with someone you’ll never see again.

Years later, driving Lyft, I found that same fleeting connection. Passengers would climb into my car, unbury private griefs and desires, then disappear at the curb.

Airports teem with these one-time intersections. Jennifer E. Smith writes that people who meet in airports “are seventy-two percent more likely to fall for each other than people who meet anywhere else.”

I’m dubious of that research. But I do wonder: How many tiny human flares are igniting right now?

Day 2

4) Airports are absurdly expensive

The next morning, the sound of planes is my alarm. No surprise there really.

Even in Mexico, airport prices are outrageous. So I leave the insulated cosmos in search of a proper meal. The doors open onto the streets of a neighborhood full of color and charm.

The smell of tacos and strong coffee drifts from local businesses. At one of them, I inhale huevos rancheros and coffee for two dollars — a meal that would have cost fifteen inside the terminal.

Stray dogs amble: one white, fluffy, and scraggly like the pooch from The Odyssey; another the color of dulce de leche, carrying itself like a mayor. An older woman in a magenta fleece and striped beanie knits from a red plastic chair facing the street.

I stroll past a giant mural of Eeyore beside the words Amor Eterno (“Eternal Love”). A few tires litter the ground. A pug naps at the center of one. Roosters crow beneath the clattering roar of planes.

For a moment, I see the airport as a membrane between two worlds.

5) Airports are exercise chambers

Back inside, I walk. Airports are excellent places to move — enormous, climate-controlled, and full of people flooring it. So my power-walking attracts minimal attention. I’d taken a cardio break in Mexico City due to the poor air quality, but inside this crisp-aired megalopolis, I can stride briskly.

Terminal to terminal. Gate to gate. Past restaurants, kiosks, currency exchanges, perfume counters, tired families, bored employees, lovers, loners, and businessmen. I walk and walk and walk, grateful that my accidental layover has given me this space to move.

6) Airports are places for love and promise

At various terminals, I read, write, and people-watch.

“There is truly no other place bearing so much love as airports,” wrote Ioana Cristina Casapu.

Loved ones embrace. Children drag backpacks shaped like animals. A man smiles broadly after a parting kiss, then wheels his suitcase away like it weighs nothing. Love does that, I guess. Makes the heavy things feel light for a minute.

In one terminal, a young woman tells an older woman she is moving to Brazil to work for a cause that’s dear to her heart. I think of myself at twenty-two, boarding a plane to Uruguay to teach English. I didn’t know how long I’d be gone — six months? Eighteen? — and it made me feel limitless.

A passage from Brushstrokes of a Gadfly comes to mind:

“The billowing diesel fumes of the airport […] assumed a peculiar pungent scent that morning, like the beginning of a new adventure, if an adventure could exude a fragrance.”

Airports hold promise. There’s always someone on the verge of a new life, about to begin again.

7) Airports are unremarkable places of stress

Of course, airports aren’t just romantic. They contain every mood. Hope and anticipation coexist with dread, boredom, irritation, and hunger.

At one restaurant, a woman shuts down her boyfriend’s attempt at conversation. She does not want to talk. Can they please just eat their chilaquiles in peace?

Douglas Adams wrote, “It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression ‘as pretty as an airport.’”

Day 3

I leave the hotel in the crisp morning air, my suitcase wheels clicking against concrete until I enter the terminal. Inside, people move through dazed, alert, and over-caffeinated. Burdened with bags and private worries.

I board my flight. Denver’s airport feels different from most. Less sterile and anonymous. Almost homey. The eavesdropping fodder shifts; I feel closer to home hearing English tossed around. At security, a brother and sister who forgot to empty their water bottles solve the problem with a chugging contest.

As I fasten my seatbelt I picture people who clap when planes land. My internal applause begins at takeoff. I clap quietly for the long-awaited departure, grateful to be on my way.

8) Airports are places of homecoming

When I exit the plane that night, I wonder how many around me are returning home, and who among them will experience the ordinary things as briefly extraordinary: their own bed, shower, or street. The familiar smell of their apartment.

I roll my suitcase outside, away from the multicultural, futuristic village of nomads.

By tomorrow morning, another couple will say a tearful goodbye.

Another stranger will strike up a conversation over garlic fries.

Another traveler will wander the terminal to get their steps in, blending in with the tidal wave of suitcase-bearing pedestrians.

And maybe a straggler who missed their flight will be there to observe it all and write it down.

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