The plane had already landed, and after collecting his untouched suitcase, Miles headed to the airport transfer area. The sign at his hotel indicated he was to wait there, along with other passengers. The clock read 5:00 p.m. Every time the automatic door opened, a cold breeze blew in like a reminder that the world was filtering in without asking permission. Time seemed still, and at the same time, every second became unbearable. It was then that he began to look around at those around him.

In front of him, a man in a wrinkled suit opened and closed his wallet every few minutes. He took out his passport, looked at it carefully, put it back, felt his pocket, and started again. Miles mentally christened him the passport obsessiveIn his repetitive gesture, he recognized his own anxiety: the attempt to control the uncontrollable, as if each verification could conjure away the fear of disappearing.

To his left, an impeccably dressed woman in white was delicately disinfecting every surface: the seat, the handle of her chic suitcase, even the bottle of water she'd just bought. After every movement, she applied hand sanitizer, with almost surgical discipline. "I'm allergic to airport air conditioning," she whispered when she noticed his gaze. Miles thought he wasn't so different from her: he, too, tried to "sterilize" reality, but he did it with lists and calculations. He silently baptized her: the nomadic hypochondriac.

A little further on, a young man with a tiny backpack was smirking. “Traveling light is traveling free,” he proclaimed loudly, as if giving an impromptu lecture. Miles watched him with a mixture of irritation and envy: he could never reduce his life to two changes of clothes and a toothbrush. That boy embodied the opposite extreme of his own insecurity. He called him in his mind. the radical minimalist.

The transfer was delayed. Half an hour passed, and the murmur among the passengers grew louder. The passport obsessive sighed each time he repeated his ritual; the woman with the alcohol offered wipes with a protective gesture; the minimalist spoke of his travels as if they were a manifesto.

That's when the fourth man arrived. A man dressed like a tourist from a catalog: light-colored Bermuda shorts, a perfectly ironed polo shirt, sandals with white socks, and an impeccable bag. He sat down with a polite smile, opened a laminated folder, and began reviewing an itinerary full of schedules and reservations. "They should be here by now," he commented calmly. "The transfer is exactly 23 minutes late. If we don't leave soon, we'll lose the restaurant reservation at 6:45, and that will throw off the entire schedule." Miles looked at him, fascinated: the tourist-controller He was able to turn the future into a mental Excel spreadsheet, disguising as serenity what was actually a fear of emptiness.

Against all odds, Miles began to converse with them. He discovered that their antics, far from alienating them, created a kind of complicity: they all shared the same suspended time, the same delay, the same absurd wait.

In that makeshift room, he realized he wasn't traveling alone. Not because he was accompanied by friends, but because each stranger carried their own invisible baggage. Perhaps that was what traveling was all about: living with other people's fears and discovering that each obsession—a passport, a drop of alcohol, a minimal backpack, a timed itinerary—is merely a different way of protecting oneself from the same abyss: uncertainty.