Thanks for clearing security. Here is your plant.

When you know O’Hare better than you know your own family, when you call flights segments, when you weave the B-to-C concourse tunnel like it’s the Cannonball Run at the end of the world, you finally, at last, become aware of the rotunda.

The rotunda hides in plain sight, adjoining two concourses you never have any real reason to connect through, between two security barriers that take you to the gates you want to go to. The rotunda is the most liminal space inside of an airport, itself the ur-liminal space. The rotunda was built in the sixties and left untouched. You know you are in the rotunda because the word “ROTUNDA” glows above, like a message from god, in three-foot-tall Chicago font. At one point, it contained a profoundly bad sandwich stand that had the words “FARMERS MARKET” in the wood crate stencil font. Now it has nothing except for payphones – payphones – and a staircase.

Real O’Hare heads ascend the staircase. At the top, you are presented with three things: the pilot’s lounge; a USO branch; and a hydroponic garden with a bunch of open seating.

The garden is small but nonetheless impossible. It is against the natural order of things to experience plants at an airport. The plants seem happy. Soon, they will be harvested into food for the only two good restaurants in O’Hare, Tortas Frontera & the Publican. You sit in an open seat, in quiet, and stare.