Every Departure Board Is a Love Letter (Wanderlust)

Lyrics

The air tastes of floor wax and recycled hope.
A thousand private anxieties, all pointed in the same direction.
I watch the big board flicker, that Solari board with its gentle, percussive clatter.
KEF. HND. SGN. 
They aren't just codes.
They are incantations.
Isabella Bird said she was weary of civilization.
She said it in 1873.
It's a familiar ache.
The longing for the creak of saddle leather under a different sun.

And every departure board is a love letter.
A list of promises from a world I haven't met yet.
Every destination, a new way to feel lonely.
And to awaken quite alone in a strange town…
Freya Stark knew.
That is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
That’s the love.

My passport is heavy in my inside pocket.
A small blue book of stamps and permissions.
It remembers the taste of dry desert dust in Persia.
The scent of damp volcanic earth after a Hawaiian rain.
My map is folded along the old creases, the ink faded where my thumb has rested.
Freya carried a gramophone to the desert.
A small, strange piece of home, just to make the wild more wild.

And every departure board is a love letter.
A list of promises from a world I haven't met yet.
Every destination, a new way to feel lonely.
And to awaken quite alone in a strange town…
Freya Stark knew.
That is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
That’s the love.

But for every seat taken, one is left empty.
For every passport stamped, a thousand sit in a quiet drawer.
This love letter is written in a language not everyone can afford to read.
It's a beautiful, cruel poem.
And we, the lucky ones, we just pretend not to notice the cost as we walk to the gate.

The board flickers again.
Clatter-clatter-clack.
Flight 714 to Cairo.
Gate B-12.
Boarding now.
Another line in the letter.
Another promise waiting.