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Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again 2004-06-05, 10:03 p.m. One of my favorite places in Kansas City is the airport. I live approximately four minutes south of the Kansas City International Airport (MCI) and whenever somebody needs to be dropped off or picked up, I happily offer to drive. I love sitting in the hallway of the terminals, watching lovers say tearful goodbyes and grandparents clinging to grandchildren and silently crying, hoping that it's not the last time. I love watching families pick up a parent who is returning from a business trip. I amuse myself by picking out the businessmen whom I suspect are sleeping with their colleagues and trying to say good-bye to Co-Worker before Wife meets him in baggage claim. I like watching little kids run around the hallways until they fall down from exhaustion, and seeing their harried parents pick up their dead-to-the-world-asleep thirty-pound toddlers and haul them onto the planes when pre-boarding is announced (and then I'm thankful I'm not on the flight when the sleepy kid wakes up and starts wailing). I love watching planes take off and land, knowing that someone on each plane is going to see someone else that they haven't seen in a while. Someone is going to a job interview. Someone is going to a wedding, someone is going to visit family, and someone else is traveling for work. Couples are taking their first vacation together. Siblings are fighting over the elbow space on the armrest. It's someone's first time in an airplane. Someone has a headache, someone is thinking about having sex in the bathroom, and someone else is getting drunk on weak $4 cocktails in tiny plastic cups. Everyone on the flight pays a different price for a seat, and everyone on the flight has a different story. I can't explain why this fascinates me so much, but I think it's the wonder and the anticipation and the love and fear and sadness and joy that is always present in the airport – it's infectious, and it's hard not to cry when you see parents embracing a child coming home for the summer, or long-distance lovers who have to part for an indeterminate amount of time. The airport is full of emotion, and it's easy to be swept up into all of it, and to wonder how many people are guessing at your story and trying to determine why you're there. And no matter why you're there, you never know when, or why, you'll be back again.
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