The departure board in an airport has always fascinated me, especially when they were made of those letters that would spin and flip over as if by magic. Even these modern electronic ones are marvels of metaphor, reducing the world to a two-dimensional space where letters and numbers stand in for distance and time. Destinations are dots on the sides of dice - every outcome seeming equally likely. Denver and Dubai, Madrid and Auckland...your eyes scan every place name as your mind visits every destination. You get to remember that they've been here all along.