There’s something about airports that makes you feel both powerful and helpless. You glide through glass corridors with your passport in hand, the hum of duty-free stores around you, the illusion of movement already under your feet—yet somewhere deep inside, you know that what truly moves is not your body, but the life you’re leaving behind.
I’ve taken more flights than I care to count. Some were for work, some for study, some because I needed to leave before the silence of familiarity swallowed me whole. Each time, I told myself it was temporary. Just another chapter. Just another airport lounge. Just another city to collect. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that every flight is a quiet act of surrender, no matter how many times you do it. And every return, no matter how joyous, carries with it the strange weight of what you’ve become elsewhere.
The flight out begins long before the gate opens. It begins with a decision. Sometimes made hastily, sometimes after sleepless nights of doubt. You fold shirts into a suitcase, double check your documents, unplug everything that once tethered you. You walk out of a flat, or your childhood bedroom, or the café you always said goodbye in. You glance back, maybe, but you don’t let yourself linger. You tell yourself you’re going to find something. Or prove something. Or forget something.
But you always carry more than you pack.
You carry the last argument you had with your brother. The scent of your grandmother’s ginger tea. A half-written message left on read. You carry the guilt of wanting more, the fear of missing what you already have. You carry your accent, your upbringing, your memories, like currency you hope will still be accepted elsewhere. You don’t realise how heavy it all is until you try to sleep mid-flight and find the cabin too quiet.
And then, there’s the flight in.
Homecomings are never as clean as departures. When you land, the sky looks the same but you’ve changed. The city you know recognises your face but not your rhythm. You take the train in, and already the advertisements are foreign—new celebrities you’ve never heard of, new slogans in strange fonts. A station you don’t remember has appeared on a line you once memorised. A building that used to be a row of hawker stalls is now a glass cube.
You feel it most when you try to walk the old streets and find yourself disoriented. A left turn that once took you home now leads to a traffic circle. Even the driving routes have shifted. You sit in the passenger seat and try to map the city from memory, but it’s as though the place has evolved without asking your permission. Sometimes you miss your car. Not just the freedom it gave you, but the way you used to navigate without thinking, like muscle memory. Now, even that feels out of sync.
The city hasn’t rejected you—but it no longer waits for you either.
Friends say, “You’re back!” but they don’t ask what you’ve been through. Or maybe you don’t know how to say it. They’ve lived entire seasons without you. You’re a guest in your own narrative now, trying to catch up. You speak in a different tone, dress in a slightly altered style, carry stories with foreign currencies, all while trying to decode new slang or policies that never existed when you left. The headlines are unfamiliar. So is the humour.
Sometimes, the return is comforting. You recognise a certain scent in the air after rain, or hear a melody on the street that tugs at something wordless. You pass a corner shop that hasn’t changed in twenty years and suddenly, everything stops. The city throws you a breadcrumb, and for a moment, you follow it back to who you were.
But even then, you can’t quite shake the sense that you’re no longer fully here. Or maybe it’s that you’ve become too much of elsewhere.
What nobody tells you is this: every departure rewrites you, and every return challenges what you thought you were returning to. You lose things in transit—not just time zones and phone chargers, but versions of yourself. The dreamer who once longed for escape. The local who knew every shortcut. The person who could once answer the question “Where are you from?” without hesitation.
Yet in that loss, there is something quietly profound. You learn to arrive, not just into places, but into people. Into moments. Into yourself. You learn that home is less about geography and more about clarity—that fleeting, fragile sense of recognition when a place, a voice, or a smell reminds you of who you were and who you’ve become.
The flight out is never just escape.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFUq16J7ugs
The flight in is never just return.
And somewhere in between—somewhere above the clouds, halfway across the world—you begin to realise that maybe you no longer need to belong fully anywhere.
Maybe it’s enough to feel everything, deeply, and carry it with you. Quietly.
Even when the seatbelt light is off.
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