Manas at Three

Three in the morning is the only hour an airport stops performing. The shops are shuttered, the screens have nothing to advertise, and the people still in the hall have all given up on looking like they do this often. A man two rows over slept with his boarding pass in his mouth. I set the camera on the tripod between two rows of blue seats, put the remote in the hand that was already holding a phone, and took this because I wanted proof of the light more than proof of me.

The aircraft behind the glass is not mine. Mine is a small regional thing parked further out on the apron where the good lighting does not reach, and it will take about three hours and twenty minutes to put me on the other side of the Caspian. The one in the frame belongs to somebody else's morning. I include it anyway, because an empty window behind a person at an airport reads as delay, and I was not delayed. I was early, by an hour, out of a nervousness I would rather write down than admit out loud.

There is a second woman in this photograph and she is me, thrown back off the glass with the apron lights running through her. I noticed her only after the frame was taken. It is the sort of thing I would cut from a novel for being too neat: the traveller and her reflection, one of them going somewhere and one of them staying in the window. In a photograph it is allowed, because the glass did it and not me.

Boarding in an hour. I am absurdly pleased, in the way you can only be at an hour when nobody is watching, that this is happening at all.