There's a particular fellowship among people on the first flight out. Nobody chose to be there. Everybody is pretending the coffee is helping.
Working across the region means an intimate relationship with the early departure. The alarm that goes off at a time that feels like a typo. The drive to the airport while the city is still deciding whether to wake up. The lounge at an hour when even the lounge seems unconvinced, full of people in good suits and bad moods, each silently rehearsing the meeting they're flying to.
You get good at it, in the way you get good at anything you do enough times. The bag that's always half packed. The exact spot to sit for the fastest exit. The quiet calculation of whether there's time to sleep or only time to prepare. And the small, reliable miracle of walking into the room a few hours later looking like someone who slept in their own bed and ate a proper breakfast.
It's not glamorous, whatever the photos of plane windows suggest. It's a job that happens to require being somewhere else by nine. But there's something I've come to quietly enjoy about it: the region is close enough that you can have breakfast in one country and a serious conversation in another, and be home in time to regret the 5am alarm all over again tomorrow.
Same flight next week, probably. Same coffee, definitely.