Airports are messy, transient places that see all versions of us. Like wind, they shepherd us from place to place, leading us through an airborne dance between one state to the next. Often, the state is mental: less of a change of physical scenery, and more of an inner shift from one way of being to another. We go from bursting with excitement for the warm, Caribbean vacation that lingers just beyond the hangar doors, to resigned relaxation on the voyage home. You came, you saw, you conquered — but you felt something, too. And it stayed with you, whether you wanted it to or not. Those emotions want to be felt, just like air. So, they are.

This realization was spurred by a conversation with a friend a few months ago. Like most of us at some point in our lives, she was fighting back tears in an airport bathroom. The harder she fought them, they more they persisted. When she texted me, I smiled. Wistfully. Because I had been there too many times to count.

Every time I walk into an airport, I’m hit with a gust of emotion. Because every time I’m there it’s to move, not just to a new place — but on. Onto what’s next after a funeral, or law school graduation, or relationship, or loss.

To this day, I vividly remember receiving the news of my father’s impending death as I was boarding a plane for a long-awaited vacation to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. My excitement for that trip was a pulsing, living thing running around my mind and through the terminal doors. Fresh snow and adventure that could only be found in snowshoes and wilderness was waiting just hours away. It was intense, exciting. But then grief weaseled its way into the mix, too, reminding me that it was there — just beyond the plane doors, in a broody overcoat and static phone call — waiting. I cried into my shoulder as I waited for my flight. Ten minutes after my plane shuttled into the sky, my father had peacefully passed.

I would return to that same airport terminal —two months later, on the same date — giggling about a beach trip with a friend. But I remembered that gate I sat outside. Stared at it like an old, outgrown friend. Felt that sharp, sinking sting all over again of knowing that I would never be the same person I was before my dad passed.

All of these emotions airports summon — loss, grief, excitement — pour out all at once. The more you try to stop it, the stronger the emotion builds, and builds, until you’re hunched in your seat, three feet away from the boarding counter, crying into your shirtsleeves and hoping no one sees. Which, of course, makes the crying worse. Because we’re convinced allowing people to see us distraught is a weakness or shortcoming. But chances are, no one notices or cares because they’re also dealing with their own deluge of hidden emotions.

I’m convinced this is all innately spiritual. Airports are transient spaces that deal in air. Air arrives in wild gusts, or gentle lulls and swoops, but it comes — to disrupt the status quo. As it does, it summons the more dormant parts of you: the nervous parts, the excited parts, but the morose parts, too. It kicks up emotions like it does leaves and moves them in front of you to examine, especially the ones you wish would remain hidden. Air exposes it all. Blows over and through emotions to remind us they exist and must be felt.

It’s all terribly inconvenient, when you think about it: Airports are supposed to be expedient hubs for travel. They bypass highways and roads and boat that take more travel time. Emotions are heavy roadblocks. Obstacles. Inconvenient.

But maybe that’s the lesson: you need to move with your emotions rather than past them. To find a way to have them move through you like air, rather than burrow and burn within you until they come gasping to the surface. Airports are just another lesson for the truth that will always find you, no matter how far you roam: you can’t outrun what you feel.