I've been thinking about them, airports, partly because I've been asked to, and because I've been forced to, since if you fly at all, it's hard not to think about these portals that lead to flight. It's a commonplace that airports aren't places at all, not really, or if they're places, they're liminal, because much of the airport is off-limits to the nontraveler. Because they are gateways to transit, airports resist pinning down. Oh, there's the charming rows of white rocking chairs in the Charlotte, NC airport that evoke the patrician south. Oh, there's the killer brisket in the Austin, TX airport that suggests the city. And oh, the smallest airports most approach placeness because they lack the obliteration of the self and place that separates the airport from the city that encloses it.

Usually the airport is located well outside the city. Only rarely is it connected by metro or subway or underground. Your best bet is a ride from a friend, maybe the one you flew out to see (she paid for the trip), and you broke up with her, but she was classy—or maybe angry, unwilling to show her devastation—enough to drive you to the airport regardless. Maybe the whole trip was a sham to see the place, or maybe you had the best intentions going in, trying to salvage this thing, and you both knew that it was near to the precipice but you were hoping it wouldn't make it over, but of course it does, and in retrospect there was nothing stopping it, and if you were stronger you would have just ended it much earlier, but then you never know, do you, whether there's still something left, whether something had changed between you, whether the sex or the emotional reconnection might somehow bring it back from the ether.

Your other option is a cab, and while I love taking cabs because of the odd conversations you get into, you get into the car from wherever, and you arrive at the airport. Only rarely do I understand the route. Only rarely can I follow it at all. All of a sudden I am transported there as if by magic. Then I'm soon to take off as if by magic, and I get to watch the ground shrink and do that magic perspective thing, the aerial view, the cold, beautiful view of the world in a way that we're really not meant to see it, the thing that really knocks me out every time, and the reason I continue to fly, even though sometimes I'm paralyzed with fear.

The little airports are the best if you want place, if you want a real interface between city or world and the next city or world you'll land in. The Keweenaw County airport with its two gates in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Better are the ones outside of America that skip the buildings altogether. But most airports, they're collections of nothing. They're space. Duty free, in many ways. The shitty bookstores where you buy your obligatory magazine, where you get your migraine that won't subside. The public spaces aren't so public there—they're only available to the traveling public, typically, which always feels like an architectural oddity to me. Imagine working at one of the restaurants or shops in the concourse and having to go through security multiple times a day, not to mention that there's no real option of repeat visitations with customers. The rare customer recurs. It is a space without a memory (at least from most of our perspectives). It is beautiful and bright.

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You've probably wandered over to place already, since that's airport-o-rific, but if not, knock yourself out.

There's a reason why it's so easy to lie to strangers in airports, why while there's very little privacy in airports, there's also anonymity. Try to find some personal space. There isn't much. The bathroom at best. A gate a couple of hours before impending flights might offer some, for a while, until others walk by and see you.

Airports evoke loneliness and untetheredness. The experience is first one of space and light. The airport is purest, of course, for the solo traveler. The accompanied traveler brings her life aboard the plane as how she's seen and how she's tied to other people. The solo traveler has more choice. Not an infinity of choice—we cannot ever really give up all of ourselves, though we might like to—but we can try out new selves. We can travel light on us.

The photograph above is from my chapbook, Safety Features. The book consists of black and white photographs and short fictions that take place exclusively in airports. I've never been a particularly good photographer, but I like what they can evoke, and how they can suggest and elide the spaces in fictions.

After all when in airports we are all fictions, I like to think. It's impossible not to be, without that sense of expectation and our usual identities grounding us. We call our lovers, our children, our parents, and we get off the phone as quickly as we can to savor the openness.

There are physical limitations, too. The water fountain situation in, say, the Continental wing of New York's Laguardia is abysmal. There are none that I could find beyond security, forcing you to buy a bottle from the vendor. We're always pushed that direction, but the small rebellion of toting our empty bottles through security and honestly responsing no to the question whether it's empty, as if we didn't know we could bring liquids past security in the pointlessly-ruled post-9/11 world: it's worth it. It's a little fuck you to the airport. We fill our empty bottles and smile at the pretty girl we see there who's doing the same and share a momentary bond, the kind that's real and that's there until it disappears into the unhumid echo of air.

The space of the airport never feels so real as when you're running to make a connection, from one concourse to another, weaving through the slow crowd.

If we weren't leaving ourselves in some small way when we enter the airport, why are we so surprised when we run into someone we know by chance, preferably in another airport attached to another city far from home? I run into Lauren in Philadelphia and am shocked and pleased and a little embarrassed, almost, to do so, to have to re-enter myself in order to have a conversation. I like Lauren, and I forget she is from Philly originally, and I'm there for a conference, and how odd and great, and then we're in lines moving in different directions, and that small moment too, like all small things, like all things, thinking geologically, or, better, cosmically, are over more quickly than we're aware of, and she is gone, and I am gone, each into our concourses, our temporary infinities.

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See also Alain de Botton's A Week at the Airport. It's fresh, but doesn't take his thinking as far as it might. It's a slight book, but lovely in enough ways to make it worth your time.