I have a bittersweet relationship with airports. As a child, I spent a lot of time in Athens airport. We’d always arrive half an hour before our flight, (back in the day when you could) and it was a mad dash to make our plane. We were the last to board –– can Mr. Tsavliris make his way to Gate 17 –– which made me feel both important and embarrassed. When I met Jason, airports became the best and worst place in the world. I remember my friend, Stephanie and I planning my outfit for my first flight to Toronto. Black trousers. White t-shirt. Denim jacket. My plane was delayed by hours and hours, and I recall sitting at Heathrow, worrying about whether Jason would have received the update, and if he’d be at the other end to greet me. Sure enough, there he was at 1 a.m., wearing a beautiful smile and a blue anorak. Leaving him made my heart ache. Every time. I’d sit on the tarmac and cry into my paper pillow. The excitement/heartache went on for five years, and between us we clocked a great many hours at airports. Heathrow. Pearson. Benito Juárez. Suvarnabhumi. Tito Minniti. When I moved to Toronto, I worked in the domestic terminal greeting flights from Timmins and Thunder Bay. I was homesick. Lonely. Purposeless. I spent hours in the magazine shop waiting for my walkie talkie to talk to me. The silver lining to the experience was seeing loved ones reunited. That always warmed my heart. Husbands and wives. Mothers and sons. There’s such intense and beautiful emotion on display at airports. Once, I met a family from Ethiopia, greeting their grandmother who had never travelled outside her village. I remember how dazed and vulnerable she looked as she stared at the escalator, a thing she’d likely never seen before. I wondered what the cold felt like as she stepped outside in her traditional cotton dress. I haven’t forgotten that woman, I likely never will. Today, as a family of five, we move through airports with ease. We’re experienced. We’ve travelled far and wide. In emergencies. At leisure. Had we known that the Covid-19 virus would escalate to the degree that it has, we wouldn’t have travelled recently. Moving through Pearson last night was surreal, to say the least. The lady at the Air Canada desk who checked us in, beautiful features and a thick Arabic accent, could not have been kinder, more reassuring. Our border control officer in Toronto welcomed us home with the warmest of smiles. It’s the people front lining through the crazy that we are so grateful for. On our drive home, I thought about a photograph of a sunset that hangs on the wall of a security hall at Pearson. “I think about how many sunsets I’ve been fortunately aware enough to enjoy,” reads the caption. “This one, even in all its splendour, is wonderfully familiar. It elegantly confirms the beauty of a world I’ve contemplated so often before. I have no hotel for tomorrow. I have only a sketch of a plan for our next expedition. Yet, for this quiet moment, in union with the shadows of a fading sun, I am content knowing that everything is going to work out just fine.”