A creepy night.

It was dark, as it tends to be at night, the building was empty save for myself. The tarpaulin walls beat against the steel frame and reverberated through the hall as empty footsteps of a distant room. Counters sporting banners for Ryanair repeated along the far wall, enticing with promises of cheap getaways and low, low, fares.

The board predicted the next flight to be in seven hours, until then I was alone.

I came to the East Midlands Airport with the intention of sleeping through the night. I wanted to get the earliest flight to Rome imagining myself fresh and ready after a sound sleep on a steel seat. I was not expecting much and in a way I found more then I imagined.

I had a full, slightly padded bench to myself. No one came around or even moved through the hall, my only companions the disembodied voice of safety mingled through the beating wind. My bag served as my pillow, my jacket my blanket. A bandana encircled my face to block out the unending waves of fluorescent light.

Sleep did not come easily.

The unbearable emptiness of a room build to be full and moving. The echoes of activity lingered in disheveled cord enticing queues of people, in empty floorspace planned to hold milling crowds and in countless flight desks waiting to send midlanders on to their dreams.

Sleep eventually came in bursts and fits. Everytime I awoke and looked around more people materialized out of the ether and onto the adjoining benches. As they arrived I could sleep easier knowing other people still existed.

That night I glimpsed our world uninhabited, empty and abandoned. As I wandered Rome that morning I felt that the edifices of today will soon become the ruins of tomorrow.