Nomad Without a Compass

The airport was my second home, a place of artificial light and fleeting farewells. I was a speck among the masses, a nomad with a battered suitcase for a companion. Everyone scurried about like drones with matching luggage, looking for their exits: no smiles, no greetings, just strangers on a moving platform to somewhere else. I had become one of them, a wanderer with no roots, lost in a crowd of faces. I had given up everything I knew — family, friends, the warm glow of belonging — for a passport and a ticket to anywhere. I had witnessed wonders, encountered countless souls, and sampled a thousand histories. But I had not discovered myself or found a place to call my own. My heart, a restless bird, kept flying, never landing.

The airport reflected my emptiness. The days were announcements, the nights a hum of engines. My suitcase, an empty shell, murmured of lives left behind. Faces faded, cities blended, and laughter sounded alien. I was a phantom at my table, a stranger in my mirror. Each mile flown left me hollow, each language a wasted wish in a fountain. Landings were reverberations, take-offs desperate jumps into a foggy future. I was Icarus, eternally pursuing the sun, my wings made of longing, powered by unfulfilled dreams. But even in the airport’s barrenness, hope glimmered. A weary smile, a child’s chuckle, a newspaper forgotten — sparks of humanity, hints that we were all connected by the same invisible thread. Maybe, I thought, the home was not a place but a feeling — a warmth not from familiarity but from connection, from the fire in a stranger’s eyes. Maybe, among the goodbyes and hellos, I was not just flying — I was learning to fall, to accept the unknown, to trust that somewhere, between the arrivals and departures, my heart would finally find its wheels and touch down on the runway of belonging.

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