As I write this, I’m sitting in the main terminal of the airport in Luqa Malta. I’m waiting for a flight, though March has already flown. I spent the month finishing off lingering admin attached to my father’s death and recovering my strength in an environment somewhat more forgiving than our cold, wet flat in Nottingham.
And for a while, I thought I was recovering. In Malta, I was able to get out more often, walk longer and further. Enough that I was tempted to push myself — and of course, I fell to that temptation. I extended my stay by a week. But by the time it came around for my flight, I was in a CFS crash so debilitating I couldn’t leave the flat where I was staying without assistance.
With the help of some good friends, I managed to recover over the course of another week. Enough so, that here I am now, ready to board my flight home.
Home.
Ever since my experience of travel, with my parents when I was barely ten years old, I have been fascinated by airports: the comings and goings, the press of people from everywhere. Some folks are setting out from close to home, others arriving from across oceans. None of them plan to remain in this space for longer than a couple hours; or perhaps, due to a delay, a storm, an incident, a day or so at most. This is the definition of liminal space, neither here nor there, always in transition. It is the stark opposite of the very idea of home.
Yet there is no way of truly living in the inbetweens, no way of building a future here, however familiar it might become.
And yet, places like this can also become comfortable, familiar. I have spent so much time in Luqa airport that I know it as one does a friendly neighbour. The way it ticks and groans, the subtle changes across months and years. It is a place I keep ending up, even while my childhood home, my university towns, the cafes and parks where I wrote my first stories are all beyond my reach.
Yet there is no way of truly living in the inbetweens, no way of building a future here, however familiar it might become. At some point, even wanderers must decide where we are going, what we might hope to build. And so, for me, April means a time for reflection, for recovery, an opportunity to plant seeds for the future — and a moment to focus on the small, slow joys that make a life.
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