WOE: Airport

Write On Edge prompt:  This week we’d like you to write a fiction or creative non-fiction piece set entirely in an airport. Take us on an adventure in 450 words or less. 


When you arrive at the airport gate, rushed and out of breath, and the plane is gone, the waiting area deserted, a flood of emotion overtakes a person.  Silence seemed to swell, looming over me before engulfing me.  A sense of fear, a clenching of the insides, a flood of dismay, then despair pulls me down into the darkness below the waves.  I stared at the window where the plane should have been, silently willing it to appear.  I closed my eyes, then opened them again. The tarmac remained deserted.   No airline service person was standing at the gate, telling people which row could board.

I was too late.  He was gone. 

I crumpled to my knees, fighting tears. Jake would never know how I felt about him.  He got on that plane and left my life, and I let him go.  Fear stitched my mouth shut and threaded through my heart, wrapped itself around my body, and I never said a word about how I much I loved him and wanted him to stay.  Jake's arms would never wrap me in their strength again, but would instead haunt my dreams.  A small sob escaped me.   As much as I wanted to blame a hulk of inanimate flying metal, I only needed to look in the mirror to know who really was to blame.   My eyes blurred with tears; a single tear escaped.  Slowly, my awareness of the surroundings returned.  The smell of coffee drifting from the Starbucks; the murmurs of people talking on phones or to each other; the paper rattling as people opened their breakfast sandwiches while they waited at the other gates.  In the window, I could see the flicker of lights from an airplane ascending into the morning sky.    I climbed to my feet and stood, murmuring a last goodbye in my head. 

"Annie?"

My breath hitched in my chest as I spun around.  Jake was standing in front of me with a quizzical look.  One look at my face and he pulled me into his embrace. It felt like home. Over his broad shoulders, I could see the gate number I had transposed in my head.  Shaking, I wrapped my arms around Jake and vowed to myself that I would never let him go again.