The silence between the flights

It’s 06:00 and I’m standing on the tarmac at an airfield that hasn’t seen a real flight in years. The control tower’s dark, the runways are cracked like old skin. I can still hear the echo of a navigation check—‘Nav One, confirm heading.’ Not from a radio, but from somewhere behind my ribs. It’s not nostalgia. It’s just how memory works when you’ve spent twenty years trusting your eyes over the instruments. The sky today is the same grey as it was on the last day I flew. No one’s coming. But I’m here anyway.