Airports

There are places that don't really exist, but where you can be for a time. I have spent hours, days in preternatural space, alone in limbo under fluorescent lights with $8 bottles of water. The removal of shoes and belts, constant checking of the looming time boards, nervous switching from phone to book to podcast, pissing every 20 minutes; pre-flight rituals performed in a sterile place where you make no memories and remember no faces.

If the only thing higher than God is the Tax-man (as my mother says) then what does 'Duty Free' mean? Duty to what, freedom from whom? Who makes the rules of no-man's land? Land with no flag but employees, water fountains and moving floors. Could a gym be put in? No, but beers at 7am and sleeping on the floor is encouraged.

My journals are littered with purgatorial reflections and hopes for the other side; the promised land of a destination...any destination, pages stained with some of that Free Duty and occasionally tears.