In Praise of an Airport Layover

A good layover is actually a healthful, restorative bore. Layovers are enforced ellipses in life — temporary tenures in air-conditioned limbo. Once you’ve made it to your gate, there is, for the moment, nothing substantial left to achieve. You are free. 

Airport terminals offer nothing to solve and nothing much to explore. They aren’t the emptiest spaces in terms of physical objects, but they may be the most vacuous. Deserts are empty but also kind of intense; empty stadiums signify the melancholy transience of greatness. Airports signal nothing more than blandness and automaticity.

In this environment, free of goals, free of the promise of a new challenge, you become a true human animal. Your condition resembles a state of nature, except without the threat of privation or predation: There are perfectly safe sandwiches, apples in reasonable shape and, frequently, a store featuring a wide range of Tom Ford fragrances. What time is it? It’s time to forage for consumer goods, but it’s also non-time, no time at all, a faint narcosis that removes you from the bindings of daily existence. 

Of all its wonders, though, perhaps the most crucial element of the layover is that it arrives at the exact moment when you need to be pacified: in the middle of a journey, right as things are about to get serious. Unless you’re a truly frequent flier, the airport tends to mark a moment of significant change. You are about to get inside a metal tube and scream through the sky into a whole new emotional reality. This is the kind of thing some people take Xanax for. 

From “Letter of Recommendation: Airport Layovers” by Sasha Capin; Photo by (@eodiin)

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