Last night my wife and I travelled out to YVR, to pick up my Mom and step-father, who were returning from three weeks in Australia. We arrived early, in case the plane chose to do so as well (it didn't) and decided to kill some time walking around the spaces open to us, since we rarely ever fly out of YVR.
If only it were possible to kill time in airport.
A man awaits the sweet release of death in an airport.
It wasn't a particularly late evening, we got there at about 7:45, and so there were still a handful of blatant traps shops still open and people milling about. It was then that I was struck with the realization of what happens to time - the sense and tangibility of it - in an airport.
Time simply ceases to function in the manner of which we're accustomed. The closest analogy I could come up with was that airports occupy a curious portion of space-time, and are, in essence, purgatory or limbo. As you walk the halls of the airport, you see people doing the only thing they can do, waiting. Everywhere you look, people are waiting. Waiting to fly, waiting to pick up luggage, to drop off luggage, to greet an arriving loved one, to leave, to climb in a taxi, to pass customs, people are always waiting.
Airports try to make the waiting more bearable. The sole purpose of airports various accoutrement, the shops, food court, seven Tim Hortons/eighteen Starbucks, and miscellaneous art pieces seems to be to ease the passage of time. I believe that airport bars exist for the singular purpose of lubricating our sense of time, to make it easier for us to deal with the crushing blow to our sense of being that accompanies the announcement that your flight has been delayed by two hours because it's still raining in Seattle.
The lubrication provided by airport bars also comes in handy when the airline gently informs you that there's an additional convenience fee on the use of the air you breathe overhead luggage rack of only $39.99, and kindly suggests that you bend over and take it.
But aside from the various kiosks and food courts with which airports try to make time pass quicker and fail, they resort to a method long understood by mankind as the worst way to pass time, sitting down and staring at a clock. Airports make this easy, they provide ample benches throughout the concourse (although finding two or more together is often difficult) and then helpfully mount a television on the ceiling, and put a clock on the corner of the screen. As you watch the seconds slowly start to reverse, like grains of sand falling up, you being to wonder what you did in life that lead to this moment. A sort of madness grips you.
What past sins did you commit that damned you to this hell. Was it the time you fed your sister small bugs? The time you forgot to feed the cat before leaving for school when you were seven? What about that time you mixed your plaids? Or wore white socks with dress shoes? How about the murderous thoughts you've just started having towards the small screaming child sitting three rows of uncomfortable benches over, could those have damned you to this hellish nightmare?
And then, suddenly, you're free to leave. Much like leaving purgatory, you ascend, purified, your essence distilled into one of purest relief, either into the clouds above on the steel wings of a plane, or into the blessed freedom of outside, into fresh air, and drive away home.