Not all people like airports. Most people actually dislike them. But there are those who appreciate airports. I do, and a few of my friends do too. People who don’t enjoy the airport experience focus on undeniable discomforts and inconveniences we inevitably go through at them.

Those who like airports don’t deny those annoyances and the frequently torturing substance of them. On the contrary, we, airport people, know them very well. We can get irritated and desperate as much as anyone else with delays, lack of convenient places to rest between flights and bad slash expensive food.

What we, airport people (lets call us that way), enjoy has nothing to do with any practical aspect of traveling. It has to do with fiction. It has to do with the non-placement, misplacement, utopian/dystopian feeling airports offer to those who are inclined to… fiction.

Airport people only enjoy the airport experience when alone. If you are with a significant other, a co-worker, your mother or whoever knows you, the airport is not a parallel universe, it’s the same everyday reality, for better and for worse. We become in such circumstances non-airport people and do nothing more than complain, like anyone else.

Alone in the airport, specially after you go through security check and you are in that no man’s land (and time) between check-in and boarding, one is no one, or anyone. And that’s when the feeling of fiction, or fiction itself, can start up.

Alone like that, inhabiting that no-place and no-time, you can pretend to be anyone, if not to others, to yourself. Actually you don’t need to pretend anything to anyone. The mere feeling that it’s possible to get into a fictionalised experience is strong enough, pleasurable enough.