Yamagata, Japan

5:16 p.m. | A Tuesday

Twelve hours before I hopped a bus to Tokyo’s Haneda airport. By 7:00 a.m. I was on a Skymark flight to Yamagata, Japan. A few hours later, I was knee-deep in a day of advertising photography for Wired Magazine (the project featured a collaboration between the Northface and Spiber, a Japanese synthetics company now making waves in the textile industry). By the late afternoon, I had returned to Yamagata’s airport for my Tokyo-bound flight. I was tired.

The small airport in Yamagata reminded me of the one in the Tri-Cities, a small airport in Tennessee that my family utilized when I was a kid. Small domestic airports have some sort of charm. There are no Starbucks or food courts. There are no massive duty-free stores stocked with gluttony-sized bags of M&Ms (or in Japan, boxes full of individually wrapped sakura macarons or matcha flavored chiffon cakes). There are no luxury stores that reek of leather or perfume. Quaint airports are the perfect place to learn how to enjoy being bored and give a bit of respite from the constant crush of capitalism.

While waiting for my connection to arrive, I explored the tiny airport. I noticed a nondescript corridor and a stairwell marked with a tiny sign indicating there was a publicly accessible viewing platform. I headed up to the roof and, with over an hour to kill, decided to watch a couple of prop planes land as the sun began to set over the nearby sea.

The sky was striking. It was one of those sunsets where the clouds had tremendous contrast, ablaze with a slew of warm and cool hues. These are my favorite sunsets, the ones that are a beautiful chaos of soft and hard color strokes, the ones that seem as if a god had taken the time to sky paint.

I became emotional looking at the color-cacophony. I was mesmerized and flooded with emotion. Entranced by the sky, I imagined that the moving swirl of clouds and vast blue beyond was comprised of all who had left, an endless graveyard of tones. I imagined that the crisp cluster of oranges was etched with my father’s energy and that the cool, less defined purples were made of my friend Tyler who had recently joined the sky painting. I thought about my sweet grandmother and my brother-in-law. I thought about all who had merged with the clouds.

I cried a bit, wiped my eyes, walked downstairs, cleared security, and sat down at one of the few airport gates. Before boarding, I peacefully observed other passengers and wondered what kind of cloud clusters they would sooner or later form. I wondered if I would be around to see them…

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