Mom woke from her hotel bed at 4AM to say goodbye. 7:30 now and a group of white boys at BWI are drinking oversized beers while the important types bluster into their phones.

I watch a man yell across the food court in greeting, “Hey, I was about to call you! I left you a message yesterday.” He’s delighted. I follow his gaze to the other party and find her beaming at him across the busy tables. I wonder at the circumstances of being in an airport and bumping into someone for whom you’d just left a message.

There are adult bros holding court on their way to snowy mountains. I move away from them because I’d prefer to overhear other voices. I am rewarded immediately by jolly airport staff joking and laughing with each other. If there’s anything I miss about city living it’s the boisterous, startling laughs.

I have to lean over to futz in my bag on the floor in front of me. As I sit up from this I find myself looking directly into a just-risen sun as it blasts between rafters in the airport ceiling. Immediately dazzled, I glance away quickly only to discover that nowhere else was touched by those sharp rays of dawn. Not my body, not any of the bodies around me, not even the floor. Only my own insignificant noggin had been startled and graced by the newborn day. And only in that brief moment, for even as I registered the blinding beauty of it all, the sun moved on.

Later as I people watch, the sneaky rays shine again into a small slice of the teeming departures scene. They grace the head of a very important person who has stopped to check his phone in the middle of the terminal bustle. He is haloed and golden for his own moment, radiant even as he forces traffic to stream around him. Hallowed inconvenience.