If you see something, say something.

On an early Sunday morning, sun rising over the skyline, the airport is a full spectrum of humanity, arrivals and departures, a tide of inspiration. Men and women arriving for their morning shifts, raising the gates on shops, punching in key codes and warming up registers. Some have been here awhile; several shops are empty, music blaring out into the terminal hall while the attendant sits behind a counter, scrolling her phone.

The terminal is a sartorial fantasy. Men wearing Hawaiian shirts, silk dress shirts, pressed oxford shirts, crumpled t-shirts. Hats of every kind: cowboy, trucker, straw, felt, beanie, wrap, hood, webbed, baseball, fedora, driver.

There are college athletes ambling through the lanes in packs, noticeable because of their height, pulling mascot-branded luggage, most often in sweatpants or baggy clothes hanging off their frames, tall socks bunched about their ankles, sliders, headphones—always headphones—eyes looking above and away, but not at you.

There are non-athletes dressed in professional sports garb, maybe headed to a game in a distant city, maybe just lacking anything else to wear. They spy compatriots from far away, each of them raising a rally cry to the other (“GEAUX TIGERS,” “WHO DEY”) or otherwise performing a tomahawk chop or, at minimum, snapping back their heads with a grin of acknowledgment.

There is a group of tennis players from an expensive private school that attracts the attention of someone who walked out of a Lacoste store somewhere and who now spends 80 hours each week staring at spreadsheets.

Elsewhere, the rich smell of coffee, a puff of jet exhaust, the garlic of everything bagels toasting, the sharp snap of hand sanitizer, the universal musk of McDonalds, and every few hundred yards the siren song scent of cinnamon rolls, a vanilla perfume chemically engineered to reorient every synapse in your brain towards hunger.

Moms in Mom Uniform, Dads in Dad Uniform, children pulling Mickey Mouse hard-case luggage, dragging blankets and stuffies and love-loves. A boy attempts to board a moving sidewalk in the wrong direction, and an adult sprints over, lifting him by the waist as he squeals in delight, his superhero backpack toting his magic screen bunched up behind his head full of fluffy hair.

The aged diaspora: some confident, poised, moneyed, tanned, fit, wearing horn-rimmed frames and quarter-zip pullovers, perfume that isn’t familiar. Others in comfort mode–sweatshirts, sneakers with thick, rounded soles, handbags clutched tightly. Yet others in wheelchairs, pushed along by uniformed attendants wearing masks who so often are not paying close attention.

A themed bar selling coconut rum drinks plays loud reggae music next to a gate boarding for Milwaukee. A trinket shop sells fleece-lined Ski Patrol hoodies next to a gate boarding for West Palm Beach. A woman cackles so loudly at a joke that her voice echoes across the terrazzo floors. Sitting next to her is a man wearing noise-canceling headphones. A man saunters in the middle of the crowd, harried passengers dodging him left and right, while he holds up his phone face-level, wholly immersed in animated conversation by video chat.

Everywhere, movement. Through the far windows, planes that transform from a blip in the sky into a wide-bodied jet, aluminum skin afire in the dawn, screaming through the atmosphere before touching down, a cloud of rubber smoke erupting from the concrete, reverse thrusters roaring. Planes taxiing, departing, arriving, headed for maintenance at a King Kong sized hangar, striped with liveries of many eras. Trains roll to and from a cargo terminal, and beyond it, the vast roof of the online megastore distribution center, filling with wares, emptying into a line of trucks formed near a stand of skinny pine trees. Beeping, tones, chimes, ubiquitous air handler white noise, intercom announcements, boarding, paging, reminding. This lane is for priority passengers, not for those with impossibly high zone numbers. There will be a complimentary bag check. This is the final call.

Though it is not yet nine in the morning, the bars are seated with patrons drinking in the glow of walls of screens playing sports—golf tournaments, exotic car races, football games, basketball—emoting action and excitement, something happening somewhere, even though none of these images are live and no one is watching anyway. A woman outside the bar stands behind an airline kiosk with a stack of credit card applications. Behind her, a sign denotes a hundred thousand free miles just for signing up. This is an extraordinary offer, she says.

There is a sixty-something man wearing a Zildjian t-shirt who looks like he could have been a roadie who toured with Tom Petty.

A pair wearing Hermes sneakers disappear through opaque sliding doors into the first-class lounge, a man and woman who both look like they are Tom Petty’s children.

“Free Fallin’” plays from speakers hidden in the ceiling high above, interrupted now and then by an assertive but calm voice instructing us to say something if we see something.