The Hour Before Departure

The hour before departure belongs to no city at all. The suitcase is checked in, the passport is back in your jacket pocket, and whatever happens next is no longer your responsibility. You cannot speed anything up and you cannot miss anything, as long as you stay within earshot of the gate.

We walked through a terminal on a weekday afternoon with no destination, just a camera, and noticed that this hour keeps its own time. It is neither waiting nor travelling, but a third thing in between. Sit with it instead of scrolling past it, and you get the quietest part of the day for free.

At the gate, everything organises itself around power sockets. Whoever brought a cable sits against the wall; whoever did not sits by the window and looks out. Two rows further along, someone is asleep with a backpack for a pillow and one foot hooked through the strap so nothing wanders off.

There is little talking and a lot of looking. The coffee goes cold, because it was only ever something to do with your hands. Then the pitch of the hall changes before the announcement even starts: people stand up a few seconds too early, because someone at the desk has switched on a microphone. Every traveller understands that sound, in any language.

Behind the glass, the opposite of the calm inside is going on. Vehicles cut tight corners, someone waves two orange paddles, and an aircraft rolls to the edge of the runway and pauses, as if taking a breath.

The take-off itself lasts barely longer than that breath. What dragged on for an hour becomes a matter of seconds: the nose lifts, the gear folds away, and the dot in the sky is already too far off to belong to this building. That is exactly why the window seats in the terminal are worth having — you get to watch the end of your own waiting go past on somebody else's plane.