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My life has always consisted of travelling.
When I was a child my father had to move for his job quite a lot, which never allowed us to settle down anywhere properly. On the off chance that we weren’t moving to a new city or new country, we visited the rest of my family scattered over half of Europe and Asia. My mother was born in Spain and her mother came from Thailand and my father was born in Palestine, but most of his siblings had also moved somewhere else. I have an aunt in France and one in Germany and one of my uncles has made it to South Korea.
As such I have seen quite a few airports.
The odd things about airports is that they all become the same on a fundamental level, yet each has their own individual character. You have excited and tired and anxious people waiting to go to another place and you have the same type of people landing. There is always someone waiting and someone’s luggage in the way and at the very least one duty free shop and bad, overpriced coffee.
A friend of mine once told me that she likes Vienna’s airport very much, despite it being a nightmare in my opinion. But for her this is the one that feels like home, this is the one she flies to when visiting her grandparents in the Czech Republic. I don’t have an airport like that, have never settled anywhere long enough to have one like it and neither have my parents.
There are airports I like more than others and some I dislike more than others too.
But my least favourite must be Gatwick.
I’m sure that objectively there are far worse airports in the world than Gatwick, but it always trips something up in my hindbrain that makes me deeply uncomfortable. It feels like you’re getting pressed through security and then into a winding, narrowing digestion tract before you get spewn out into the crowded waiting room of a registration office.
If I can avoid it, I’ll take a flight from one of the other airports in London - sadly it cannot always be. Last November when I had to fly to Copenhagen because of work was one of those times. The price was the cheapest and the time also fit the window I had to get there, so I took it.
Gatwick turned out to be every bit as tedious as I remembered it to be. Thanks to online check-in and having only a night to stay I could at least avoid baggage drop and check-in at the counter. Security check was something I was accustomed to enough to not be bothered much. From there I went into the duty-free funnel of hell. If you haven’t been there, let me tell you it’s not fun. It’s a winding pathway left and right framed by one shop after the other, and it’s too narrow to go back so everyone gets ushered through it and there is no shortcut to avoid going through all the shops or enough space to actually just ignore and avoid them. When you reach the end of what seems more appropriate in a house of mirrors at a carnival you end up in an equally cramped waiting hall.
It seemed a bit quieter than I would’ve expected from the amount of people going through security but it was still very much packed and people looking for the announcement of their gate.
I didn’t have very long to wait, but the gate being announced only half an hour before boarding meant I needed to hurry a bit, as the flight to Copenhagen went from one of the further away gates.
Along the way the crowd of people thinned out more and more until it was just me in the long hallway. Which wasn’t all that unusual but still left me feeling uncomfortable. I was convinced that sooner or later someone would turn up again, either in front of me or behind me, looking for the same gate.
Except no one did.
I took a left turn and then another and then what seemed like another, without the gate getting nearer. I must have walked already ten minutes following one sign to the next and one corner to another, when I noticed that the signs were gone. That of all things was when I got nervous.
Sure enough I had been in enough airports with no or little amount of signs pointing you to the right gate, but this seemed odd. I still followed the corridor down to the end, in the hopes that no signs simply meant I was as good as there.
I wasn’t and when I reached the corner it was just another left turn. Now airports are weird. If you’ve seen Paris you know a thing or two about how devastating the results are of creative architects being let loose on a building that should be focused on practicality over design. But even by airport standards this didn’t seem right.
So I did the only reasonable thing and went back the way I came. Except that didn’t work out. Because when I got back to the corner it only turned left, which couldn’t be right. The corridor leading down was also devoid of any signs. Just an endless stretch of corridor that ended in another corner I suspected would go also left, even before I saw it.
I just stood there for an entire minute, staring at it and in the end decided that just standing around would get me nowhere either, I might at least try to find my way out. Barely two steps into the corridor I regretted my decision.
The entire left side of the corridor was covered with a glass front and the moment I set foot into the corridor I saw that something was very wrong with the view. There should have been a view of the landing and starting field, of the other terminals, of stretches of asphalt. There wasn’t. There was just an empty field and an empty sky and there was simply no end to it. All of it loomed and stretched seemingly forever.
My steps faltered as panic gripped me and I couldn’t not stare out into this distorted landscape that just wouldn’t end . I was nearly dizzy with the scale of it all and stumbled back to the corner I had walked out from. I closed my eyes, pressed my hands against them so hard I could see stars.
Then I heard it, just faintly at first, but growing stronger with each repeat. “This is the last call for flight 8261 to Copenhagen, passengers please make your way to gate 71.”
Just like that other sounds returned, the screams of a baby, others chatting, the overall noise of an airport and when I dared to open my eyes again the corridor had gone back to normal and the world outside as well.
Above me was a sign pointing into the direction of the gate I needed to go to.
I did make that flight in the end and I did order several small bottles of whisky. I told myself that I had just hallucinated it. Too much stress, too little sleep, too many times at the airport. These days, though, I make a point of travelling less, especially when it comes to travelling via plane. And I haven’t taken a single flight from Gatwick since.