Hello, goodbye.

I made a quick trip home to Cleveland over the weekend.  It is a short flight and an easy, familiar journey.  While I was waiting for my mom to pick me up, I was thinking how much I enjoy watching people being dropped off and picked up at the airport.

The emotional welcomes and farewells are of course heartwarming and heartbreaking, respectively.  They are like glimpses into a story whose context you don’t know, yet simultaneously offer so much information.  You see the many ways in which people express themselves, or otherwise hold feelings tightly within.  The overt displays of love stand among the whole spectrum of human emotion and relatedness, marking mundane to monumental moments.

These interactions serve almost as book ends to the beginnings or conclusions of chapters of one’s life.  It’s this mix of first time fliers, final farewells, casual business travelers and epic beginnings that appeals to me.  The coming together and separating that illustrates life’s perpetual motion.  The visual confirmation that every goodbye is followed by a hello down the line.