Last week, flying felt scintillating with a tiny bit of anxiety mixed in like it usually does.

This week, same flight, same destination, it felt like commuting – almost disappointingly short. The provinciality of LaGuardia, glamor of long ago travel thoroughly scrubbed away by the cost-cutting and the homeland-security, the 1960s-vintage American Airlines logo somewhere far above and visible only from the highway, hidden by the eternal construction, with its low ceilings and flickering fluorescent lighting seemingly designed to make everyone’s skin look it’s sickest , and machine-gun-toting soldiers suspiciously eyeing you as you come up a squeaky escalator(I only later learned that there was another explosion on subway this morning) give off an air of a dystopia.

But looking out the window at the planes and the moment of leaving the ground felt as full of hope as it always was.