Before the Morning Comes

Before the Morning Comes

The airport at two in the morning feels like a place that has forgotten its own purpose.

Most of the lights are dimmed, the long corridors washed in a tired yellow glow that flickers just enough to remind you no one is really meant to be awake here. Flights are delayed indefinitely. Announcements trail off mid-sentence, as if even the speakers have grown weary of pretending certainty exists.

I’m sitting on the floor near a closed café, my back against my carry-on, scrolling through my phone without reading anything. Around me, strangers sleep in awkward angles, coats draped over armrests, shoes abandoned like small white flags.

“You know they reopen the coffee stand at three,” a voice says.

I look up.

She’s standing a few feet away, holding a paper cup like it’s precious. Dark hair pulled into a loose knot, oversized jumper, eyes bright in a way that suggests she’s not nearly as tired as she should be.

“They do?” I ask.

She nods, smiling. “But you have to look determined. Like you’ve survived something.”

That earns a laugh from me, surprising in its ease. “I can manage that.”

She gestures toward the empty chairs. “Mind if I sit?”

We introduce ourselves in the lazy way people do when time feels unimportant. First names only. No last names. No context. Just enough to anchor the moment.

She hands me the coffee she’s already procured. “I grabbed an extra. On instinct.”

“Instincts can be dangerous,” I say, but I take it anyway.

We talk about small things at first. Where we were supposed to be going. How long we’ve been stuck. Which flights were cancelled first. The conversation drifts the way smoke does, never quite settling, always curling back into something new.

At some point, the small things fall away.

She tells me about the job she’s leaving behind. How she finally decided she couldn’t keep shrinking herself to fit a version of life that made sense to everyone else. I tell her about the relationship that ended quietly, not with a fight but with a realisation that neither of us was really choosing the other anymore.

There’s laughter. The kind that comes unexpectedly, spilling out when you realise someone understands exactly what you mean without needing the full explanation.

Outside the wide glass windows, the night begins to thin. Not dawn yet, but its promise. A softening at the edges of darkness.

“Do you believe in timing?” she asks suddenly.

I think about that. About how many things in my life have arrived too early or too late. About how this conversation feels suspended, fragile, perfect in its impermanence.

“I think timing is overrated,” I say. “But moments matter.”

She studies me, like she’s committing my face to memory. “I like that answer.”

When the first boarding call crackles through the speakers, it feels intrusive. Like someone knocking on a door we hadn’t realised we’d closed.

We stand, reluctantly.

“So,” she says, adjusting her bag on her shoulder. “This is where we pretend we’re strangers again.”

“Were we ever?” I ask.

She smiles. Soft. Real. “Maybe not.”

We exchange numbers without ceremony, no promises attached. Just possibility, lightly held.

As we walk toward different gates, I glance back once. She does the same.

By the time the morning comes, the airport will remember itself. Flights will depart. People will resume their lives.

But something has already changed.

And for now, that’s enough.