"Countries"

Airports are in-between countries, located in a place without being part of it, full of people and planes that are coming and going and never decide to stay. Counting the time I have spent waiting for connecting flights, I have been to a third of the country's states and most of its greatest cities.

But airports are temporary by nature, free-floating and without connection, though they connect thousands of people each day: families, lovers, business associates. On the map found in the back of in-flight magazines, the graphic representation of all the flights available, there are so many curved paths that the country looks smothered by thread. The cities are pins, connected by blue lines. Airports make it possible to travel faster and further than ever before, like an early advertisement for air travel might have read, but the airports themselves are an insulated world with little connection to the cities they reside in. Someone who has been to the airport in Las Vegas has not been to Vegas, though there are slot machines in the airport as well.

When I fly with my family it's less obvious, that sense of impermanence, probably because I know that these people are constant even in places that aren't. But when I wait in airports alone I feel like I have a shield around me, transparent and thin, yet impossible to break. I'm reliant only on myself, and rather than scaring me it enables me to watch what happens without being attached to the outcome. It's not like sitting outside of a group of people who you wish you could talk to. It's being a loner by choice. That's a happier, more rewarding feeling than you might expect.

The sense of independence is intoxicating. I choose where to eat dinner and I give the cashier my father's debit card, hoping she assumes it's mine. I sit at a table all on my own and read a book, knowing my mother would never let me get away with that kind of multitasking. I take as long as I want and relish in the fact that there is no one to rush or distract me. I walk into a store that sells nothing but watches and ask the cashier questions, as if I actually plan on buying one; I know that even if she suspects my game, it is her job to pretend she doesn't. I walk up and down the concourses and travel on every moving walkway I can find. All around me there are people, but they can't touch me. It has never felt this good to be alone.

If an airport is an island outside of normal boundaries, like a little world that belongs to nothing but itself, the status of an airplane is even stranger. What if someone breaks the law while in the air? In what courts are they charged? Not the state they were above when it happened; those governments' jurisdictions don't include the sky. Maybe they're charged in their home state, to make things simple, or maybe felony at 50,000 feet is so rare that there is no official protocol. The only lawbreaking I have seen addressed on airplanes is the threat of terrorism and people attempting to smoke in the bathrooms.

The limits and dividing lines of land mean nothing in the air. The atmosphere is one vast country, lovely but unchanging; one mile is often identical to the next. Though strangers rarely speak on planes they are, in a sense, a community. There is no way to contact the land and the people still bound to it. On a plane I am set adrift in a tiny box, miles high in the air, free for a few hours of all the imaginary dividing lines that people use to separate themselves.

The takeoff always terrifies me, so I have to shut my eyes, breathing deep and feigning calmness until we have evened out. But beyond that I love the window seat, especially at night, peering down into a vast sweep of darkness with lights scattered like stars. I search for a tiny, moving dot to focus on- cars on the highway- and I wonder who's inside each truck or four-door sedan. Where they're going, what they're thinking. I wonder if they've noticed the plane soaring over them and if someone on a plane has ever spied my own car on the ground, if they guessed about me and got it right, until one of us travels too far forward and I am lost from sight.