Shephali Bhatt

ALT WINGING IT A few months ago, I told a friend that I had suddenly become curious about birds. I wasn’t sure if I was actively going to pursue bird-watching, but they promptly added me to an Instagram group of birders. It is the most active group I’m part of, which also means I am spectacularly bad at keeping up with it. I’ve now made a habit of going there once a fortnight to watch all the reels at once. It feels like watching a little bird documentary, with short episodes I can play one after another. For 15 minutes straight, I learn about the guttural call of the male great hornbill, a recording of a black-and-yellow broadbill that sounds like a washing machine whirling through its final cycle, or the common poorwill, a rare bird known to escape winters by hibernating. It takes me back to the days of sitting for hours watching NatGeo as a kid.

ALT Calling ‘dropping someone off at the airport’ a love language is a cop-out. It discounts the wistfulness of seeing someone off, not knowing if you’ll ever see them again. When you’re receiving someone at the airport, you’re 99% certain of making another memory with them; they’ll arrive any minute now. Watching them go far from your line of sight, on the other hand, makes you look back even as you look ahead at the Departure Gate they’re about to walk through. You replay a montage of common high points in 10X, pausing at the moments they made you feel loved, worrying there weren’t enough of those where you made them feel loved, too. Suddenly, everything up until this point becomes a story. Anything after this will be surplus, oddly a chance to make up the deficit. Dropping someone off at the airport is like a slow climb up a roller coaster’s tipping point, only to be met with an indefinite power cut, even as your gut feels the pit of a rapid fall down the track.