Envisage this, if you will: waiting for a flight back home….....lying flat and hard on a blinding plain surface, shuffling and twitching your shoulder blades to find a comfortable position like trying to squeeze together two north poles on a bar magnet. Your body wants to flick off the power but your mind is barricading the fuse box and every shape and pattern around is so clinical it literally pierces your eyes to fix your gaze on them. And in this geometrically flawless man made vacuum of space there is one clock, and even this difficult to look at. If you squint hard enough you can just about deduce two frail hands, the only other form of life around you. One of these moves mockingly forwards between successive digits, and then backwards. Have some moments been misplaced? Where did those minutes come from that you thought you'd lost hours ago? Is your paranoia the thief of time?
Searing lights once again...then a phonetic mismatch reverberates around you, squeaking its rubbery soles along the polished floor and bouncing off the walls before crashing overhead.
And then, an elderly gentleman peers into your eye line...his expression pitched somewhere between bafflement and snarling melancholy. He reaches out his hand, motioning towards where he's standing. Do you trust him? He is a stranger to you, but represents human life. You take the chance.
He guides you to the concertinaed doors and you haven’t so much as placed one weary foot on the puddled pavement outside before realising…..shit, youre not even at the airport terminal yet
That was the Q23 bus that takes you there…..you still have 43 hours before you fly.