I never write stories, although I would love to all the time I simply don’t have the time, sigh. But somehow I found time to write this. It was inspired by a certain day at the airport and the accumulation of many different thoughts and by someone special. It’s just here for your reading pleasure and because it was a pleasure to write, even though you may all never know all the thoughts that went into it, just enjoy.


Gate 5

He was alone, in the international departure lounge, not a familiar setting. The atmosphere was a conflict of sounds, colors and motion. He stood there, his sweat irregular in the chilled air he grasped at his memory before those details of thought he needed to remember would disappear, clouded over by time and emotion …
“Wasn’t it terminal 2?”
He glanced at his watch, like an hourglass glued to a table, eerily eating away time.
He ran; preferring stairs over crowded escalators, dodging crowds without slowing his pace.
“Which airlines would it be?”
He didn’t know the answer, there hadn’t been much a lead, just a note … well actually more than a note, for it held in it a promise, a chance he might see her. He had grabbed the nearest taxi, leaving home with only a hastily grabbed handful of bills from his desk and sockless shoes.
And now he searched, so many faces somehow seemed like her, but they were not, no one was like her …
Then he heard it. Now boarding … a flight number … an airlines … a city …
“… now at gate 5.”
The terminal seemed to expand like a stadium, roof unfolding, shadows escaping. So little time, so much space,
“Where is gate 5?!”
He ran as if chased now, and actually he was, by … time.
The oversized numeral had never look so pleasing as he finally reached gate 5, but … something was wrong! No lines of passengers hurriedly making there way through the gate, no crying children, no overstuffed baggage. There was only the customary rows of yellow chairs dotted with multi-colored heads and topped off with a deadpanned TV commentator stuffed into the tiny television at the end.
He was too tired to run off and keep looking, what was the use anyways, why should he have come all this way? He didn’t even know if he loved her, it just felt like love, it just … it just … he didn’t know. He didn’t know a lot, in spite of all the thinking and telling himself he did know, he didn’t. But he wanted too, he needed too, just like he needed to see her, and had executed every silly decision in the chance he might.
Was it all going to be in vain, all going to end in an empty terminal gate?
He looked into this distance, the yellow chairs blurring into the distance.
And then he saw another face that looked like hers, although he knew it wasn’t. She was leaning over her chair a good 40 meters away, dislodging a novel from a backpack. He followed her eyes up as she got back up, as she glanced around in a way only an hour of boredom could cause.
She froze.
He froze …
Then she smiled and it gave her away, cause not in a trillion faces was there a smile like that, he knew.
Her book hit the floor as if the two had hopelessly been destined for each other in a way only books and floors could. But she didn’t notice, he didn’t notice. She charged over and jumped into his arms, entangling her legs around him, laughing like a kid at her first day of school, completely oblivious to the world around her.
“What are you doing here! I know I told you I would come but I didn’t expect you to be here, you’re so good at surprises! I actually shouldn’t even be here anymore but the flight was delayed so I have to wait longer to see my dad off.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time, although there were a dozen trivial things that could be dished out, they really didn’t matter.
“You know, I think I love you … I’m not sure, but I think I’ve just proved it to myself.”
She said nothing, she thought, she thought of words in letters that perhaps were only words. Then … not now.
“I just proved it to myself too,” she said.