The Glass Between Us

There is a particular, thin quality to the light of a northern departure lounge, where the sun hits the glass at an angle that strips away the heat and leaves only the clarity of the horizon. It is a sterile, suspended light, the kind that forces you to look through the window rather than at it. We spend so much of our lives in these transition spaces, waiting for the weather to change or for the engines to turn over, watching the world outside become a ghost of the world inside. We are always looking at a version of ourselves reflected against the clouds, a double exposure of who we are and where we are going. It is a strange, quiet ache to see the sky superimposed over the machinery of our own movement. Does the light ever truly belong to the place it touches, or is it just passing through, like us, leaving only a faint, shimmering trace on the surface of the glass?

Suraj Krishnamurthy Cheemangala has captured this stillness in his photograph titled The Reflecting Terminal. It holds that exact, pearlescent glow of a sky caught between departure and arrival. Does this image make you feel like you are leaving, or like you have finally come home?