How to prepare yourself for a 3am flight
“No one feels good at four in the morning,” the poet Wislawa Szymborska declares in her poem about that particularly troubling time of day. No one feels good at 3am, either. And yet that is the time at which Norwegian Air appears to enjoy departing from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, and who am I to tell an airplane otherwise? I head to London at just that time tonight.
Since I have some flight anxiety, I tend to think a lot in advance about what my travel experience will be like. Here is what I imagine the airport will be like when I arrive at JFK in a few hours:
a) Lonely
b) Dark
c) Full of ghosts?
Seeking reassurance, I looked around the internet to see if other travelers had reports of, I don’t know, a haunted Hudson News stand or something. I did not find anything spooky, but I did find one traveler, departing from Cairo at 3am, who planned to check into a hotel beforehand so that they could take a nap and get something to eat before the airport. Fancy!
Other than that, there’s not a ton of advice about what to do if your flight leaves at a weird time, I guess because it’s basically similar to the advice you’d get for flying a typical red-eye, which is all useless anyway: You’re going to feel terrible no matter what, no matter how much you try to convince yourself otherwise.
There’s a certain relief that comes with admitting that your flight experience is probably going to be not just annoying but spooky, to boot. There is no life hack for the 3am flight, just as there’s no way getting around the pure absurdity of being awake at four in the morning. As Szymborska says, you just resign yourself to the moment, and wait for a new time to come.
FOUR IN THE MORNING
The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.
The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
The hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.
No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
--three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come
if we're to go on living.