I can walk
Changi Terminal 3 with my eyes half closed.
I know which lounge has the good shower stalls. Where the quiet corner is, past the last gate, where nobody thinks to sit. I know the exact bend in the corridor where the light turns soft in the early morning.
But ask me about the neighbourhood where my employer stayed for two weeks in Milan, and I go quiet.
I know the airports. I don't know the cities.
Ten years, forty-something destinations, and this is what I've collected: gate numbers instead of street names. I could tell you the fastest transit route through Heathrow. Which side of the Tokyo lounge has power outlets. The precise walk from immigration to baggage in Dubai when you're moving fast and tired.
These are the maps I carry.
Not of places — of passages.
The strange part is how deep it runs. I feel a small, embarrassing comfort landing in a terminal I recognise. A familiar coffee stand. The same signage font. My body relaxes before my mind catches up.
There was a small street in London, near a flat we returned to maybe six times. There was a bakery on the corner. I passed it every morning on the way to arrange the car. I never once went in.
Six visits. And I couldn't tell you what they sold.
That's the trade I never agreed to but made anyway — swapping the slow knowing of a place for the fast knowing of how to leave it. I know how to get out of forty cities. I barely know how to be in any of them.
I've thought about this a lot, usually somewhere over an ocean at 3am. An airport asks nothing of you. It doesn't expect you to belong. You move through it, and it lets you go.
There's a kind of relief in a place that never wants you to stay.
A neighbourhood is harder. It has rhythms you'd have to learn. Faces that might start to recognise you. It asks for time I never seemed to have, because my job was always the next departure, not the current arrival. So I got fluent in the in-between. The lounges. The corridors. The waiting.
I noticed it properly last year, in a city I'd visited maybe a dozen times. My employer mentioned a park nearby, one he'd walked in that morning. He described the trees, an old man feeding pigeons, a stall selling roasted chestnuts.
I'd been to that city a dozen times. I'd never seen the park.
He'd lived a small piece of the place. I'd only ever managed it.
That's the quiet cost nobody puts in the brochure. You can travel constantly and still, somehow, never arrive.
These days I leave a little space. Ten minutes here. An unplanned walk there. Last month I finally went into a bakery near a hotel we always use. I bought something I couldn't name and ate it standing on the street, watching the neighbourhood do its ordinary morning.
It wasn't much. But for once I wasn't passing through.
I was, briefly, just there.
The airports will always be easy. That familiarity is real, and I won't pretend it isn't a comfort. But I'm learning that knowing how to leave a place well is not the same as knowing the place at all. And I'd like, before the next ten years pass, to remember a few streets as clearly as I remember the gates.
For more honest reflection on what constant movement does to you, read
The Reality of Constant Travel: Life as a Personal Assistant on the Move.
