The Freedom of Departures

Why airport departures feel like freedom, reinvention, and the chance to start over.

There’s a particular feeling that settles the moment I step into an airport departures terminal. It isn’t always the same. Sometimes it’s excitement. Sometimes panic. Sometimes the weight of goodbye. But underneath it all, there’s something quieter, something I can never quite name.

It’s the return of a feeling I thought I’d outgrown, the one you have when you’re young and everything feels possible. Somewhere along the way, life crowds it out: the rent, the deadlines, the routines that calcify into permanence. But here, in this liminal space of motion and departure, it rushes back.

Because here, you are allowed to imagine. You could buy the ticket. Get on the plane. Walk away from the known and start over. Reinvent yourself. Disappear, if only in theory. The only thing stopping you is you.

Maybe that’s why I’m obsessed with planes cutting across the sky, or with flight tracker apps that show people in motion. Strangers suspended over oceans, each one living out some version of “what if.” And maybe it’s why I love hotel bars too — these odd little crossroads where people from everywhere converge. Different cities, countries, backgrounds, and stories, all colliding in one place. Strangers meet. Lovers begin. Whole lives intersect for a night, then scatter again.

It’s not about being lost. It’s about being close to reinvention.

And that’s what this series is about: that charged moment in the departure hall, when every life feels negotiable again. Together, we’ll pick a place, a timeframe, a version of ourselves brave enough to go, and ask: what might the next 24, 48, or 72 hours look like if we just went?