On Airports

I just got home from sending-off a friend at South Korea’s Incheon International Airport, and realized that I’ve been to the airport more than I have been to any place in South Korea in less than six months. That’s not considering my workplace which will obviously take the number one spot in my top recurring destinations in South Korea. That’s four times so I could fetch people arriving here, and four times to send them back home to the Philippines.

Okay fine, so my weekly trips to the church may take the real second spot, but I guess what I am just trying to get here is the airport’s just been too much, and I don’t seem to like the feeling of it.

But to set the record straight, it’s not like I have qualms over welcoming or sending-off people at the airport, nor such tasks have been much of a disturbance to me.

I had these thoughts upon getting back to the apartment because as I was walking my way to the AREX tonight (the train connecting the airport to Seoul’s metro rail system), I had the same pangs of sadness, which doesn’t really feel good when you’ve just been from a good kind of high from seeing family and friends who came over to visit and tour with you.

It’s a long walk from the airport departure grounds to the AREX area, if I may tell, and it’s usually that dark, wide and barren area in the airport, so those moments of sadness can really take a toll on you.

I never liked airports. My childhood memory has branded it as such a taboo, a place for sure- ball traumas. Visits to the airport for me meant the end of fun weekend mall trips and complete family dinners. It meant no more chocolates on the fridge and no more splurge of new stuffs to be fancied from a dad who’s willing to give it all. It’s because dad needs to go back to work, in a place far away from home. The airport is, always in my mind, the one who can always take my dad away.

I remember telling myself one time when I was a kid that I will never marry a soldier, a pilot, a seaman, or anyone who has to be away for a considerable amount of time for work. A week or two for some work-related trips may do, but I said I would not want to apply the term “monthly allotment” to my everyday life. Being the kid that I was, I cared so much about the uneasiness that such situation may bring, devoid of the real painful reason why so many people, including my father, needed to do it.

Never did I realize that I have actually tried to dodge on being the one who’s left behind by being the one who needs to leave. But here’s the thing. What made it painful for us family before was that we cannot afford to visit our father in that faraway workplace. Now that I have people who can afford to visit me, I still get that feeling of being left behind.

Just my two cents of emotional rollercoaster high.