nobody belongs there.
nobody intends to stay.
layovers ask nothing of you except that you wait.
the airport is full of people suspended between places, carrying proof of where they’ve been and hope for where they’re going.
think about what a layover actually is:
you’re no longer where you came from
you’re not yet where you’re going
you have a ticket, but not certainty
people arrive dragging backpacks and suitcases behind them, exhausted from where they’ve been and anxious about where they’re going. some stare at departure boards, some sleep on metal benches. some wander aimlessly through duty-free shops buying things they don’t need. hell, some go out to the city to maximise their time. everyone is waiting for something.
and nobody seems bothered by it.
I have always liked layovers - because of the strange permission it grants. a layover is a temporary suspension of responsibility. for just a few hours, there is nowhere to be except exactly where you are. you cannot speed up the clock. you cannot arrive any sooner. you are simply between places.
the world outside continues without you and you exist in a small pocket of time where your only obligation is to wait. how inconvenient.
the older I get, the more I realise how much of life is spent in these in-between spaces. not arriving, not leaving, simply existing somewhere between what was and what will be.
when I moved abroad, I thought I was moving from point A to point B. I imagined belonging would transfer neatly, as though home were something that could be packed into a suitcase and unpacked upon arrival.
but no, the life I left behind continued without me. I’ve gone home twice now in 1.5 years and every time I’m back home, the environment feels simultaneously familiar yet foreign. a new shop has opened up in my neighbourhood mall. a friend has moved away. my best friend literally got married. (I’m the MOH no this isn’t news) new routines have formed in my absence. the version of home I carried in my head no longer perfectly matched the reality waiting for me.
there are moments however where everything feels exactly as I remember — the same roads, the same food, the same jokes that have somehow survived years of repetition.
but still there are other moments when I become aware that I am no longer standing in quite the same place I once occupied.
welp.
as I built a life elsewhere, I found pieces of myself becoming rooted in new places. new habits emerged, new friendships formed, new versions of myself I’d never imagined myself to be. even then, I never felt entirely transplanted. part of me remains elsewhere - a particular memory attached to a street corner, a version of myself that only existed in a different city among different people.
the result is difficult to describe.
I do not belong.
not because either place has rejected me, but because belonging itself has become more complicated than geography. I am too changed to fit perfectly into the life I left behind, yet too shaped by it to completely separate myself from it. I carry traces of one place into another, and traces of that place back again. the boundaries blur and the identities overlap.
for a long time, I treated this feeling like a failure. why is my purgatory a layover? 25 years of my life and I had not yet arrived.
airports understand this better than we do.
they were never designed for permanence. they make no promises about certainty. they simply exist as a space between what was and what will be.
maybe that is why I find them comforting. a layover is not the same thing as being lost.
perhaps life isn’t a destination at all.
perhaps we’re all perpetually in transit.