Terminal

Terminal.

It’s a word that gets used in so many ways.

A train pulls into its final stop. A plane touches down after hours in the air. A bus completes its route, passengers stepping off into a new city, a familiar town, or somewhere in between. A terminal marks the end of the line.

Yet, terminals are also places of movement—of departures as much as arrivals. Airports, train stations, bus depots, and shipping ports pulse with energy, people in motion, goods shifting from one place to the next. Some terminals are sprawling, vast networks of gates, tracks, platforms, and concourses. Others are compact but no less essential, hubs where paths intersect, where connections are made.

Grand Central Terminal is one of those places. It’s where Metro-North trains come in from the suburbs of New York and Connecticut, but they stop there, never going beyond 42nd Street. A terminal marks the end of the line. Yet people constantly call it Grand Central Station, mixing it up with the subway station below, where the 4, 5, 6, 7, and S trains snake through the tunnels of Manhattan. The distinction matters. A station is a stop along the way; a terminal is where the journey ends.

Or begins.

The last time I was at Port Authority Terminal, we were waiting to take the Amtrak Silver Bullet down to Savannah. We were at the start of our trip. The first leg of the journey. That’s when a man came up to me and said he had just gotten out of jail. He’d missed his train and needed $5. I barely had time to process what he was saying before I caught the look on my daughter’s face—her eyes practically popped out and rolled onto the ground.

Just got out of jail.

You don’t expect to hear that while standing in a terminal, scanning the schedule, planning your next move.

But you should.

Because a terminal isn’t just a neatly controlled environment of ticketed passengers and scheduled departures. It’s a place where people’s lives collide—where someone is arriving home after years away, someone else is leaving behind everything they know, and someone is standing at the crossroads of before and after.

We were starting our trip. And in his own way, so was he. Restarting his life, supposedly, out of prison.

Terminals don’t just move people. They move information.

Computers have terminals, too. Endpoints of connection—machines designed to process, relay, and transmit data. A computer terminal once meant a physical console, a place where a user typed commands, sent messages, accessed the vast, unseen network of information.

Now, terminals are everywhere. In our pockets. At our fingertips. With a tap, we send money, purchase tickets, reroute shipments, connect with people thousands of miles away. In an instant, a transaction is complete. A message is sent. A connection is made.

A terminal is both an end and a beginning.

But some terminals don’t connect to anything. Some go dark.

The word itself comes from the Latin terminus—meaning end, boundary, limit. The Late Latin terminalis means "pertaining to the boundary or the end." End. That’s another definition: "relating to an end." But an end of what?

Sometimes it’s the end of a journey. The last stop before a new one begins.

Sometimes it’s a connection point—between networks, between people, between systems.

And sometimes… it’s the end of a life.

That’s the terminal no one wants to hear.

Terminal illness. A diagnosis that stops everything. That halts the movement, the rushing, the running for trains and chasing after buses.

You’re stopped in your tracks.

What tracks? The tracks of your life.

Unlike a train or a flight, this terminal doesn’t run on a fixed schedule. There’s no blinking departure board listing three months, six months, one year. No assurance of time left. Just a finality waiting at the horizon, creeping closer.

And yet, even in this kind of terminal, there is movement. Time shifts. Some people speed up—booking trips, making amends, filling the days with as much as they can. Others slow down, finding meaning in quiet moments, savoring the way light filters through a window, the sound of familiar voices, the presence of those who stay.

Some fight the ending, clinging to the last threads of time. Others prepare.

A terminal marks an ending. But endings are not always absolute.

Memories carry forward. Stories remain. The echoes of a life persist in the people left behind.

But even those will fade one day.

A terminal is a place of departure. But sometimes, in some way, it is also a place of return.

And yet.

There is a moment when the train reaches its final stop. When the last bus pulls in, its engine going silent. When the doors close, the lights dim, the crowds disappear.

A terminal. The end.

Not just of a journey. Not just of a story.

Of life.

Fin.