If I hadn’t cried that day at the airport by my flight’s gate with disconcerting openness, the mid-aged lady with the outrageously long acrylic nails and red flannel shirt tied around her waist would not have stared to then excuse herself from staring and amiably point out the mascara goop at the corner of my one eye. I would then not have gone to the bathroom to fix the anxious mess that I looked, tripping on my way over a seemingly rich Italian boy’s long Cesare Paciotti shoes with the signature sword emblem on their soles, which adorned the protruding long feet that sat on a right angle at the end of his stretched out lanky legs.
He would then not have picked up the boarding pass that fell from the book it marked, Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, on my hasty hurry to the bathroom – Swissport / GVA-LUG, Seat 10A, Gate B26 – and he would not have had to wait outside the women’s bathroom, until I finished the rest of my crying and apply fresh mascara, so that he could give me the boarding pass with a big smile and spectacled eyes mirroring the fluorescence of airport lights.
I would then not have had to say, “Thank you for your kindness”, to which he replied, “Very much, to you”, in his Italian accent, nor would I have had given up on my stubborn sadness to laugh endearingly at his incorrect response and pat him on the back for trying to converse in English, let alone point at his shoes to tell him how nice they were in his language that has so many verb tenses and was, therefore, difficult for me to master.
He would then not have smiled a goofy smile and asked why I was crying earlier, an innocent question with a heavy answer I hesitated to share, when from the corner of my eye I spotted the lady with the wrapped flannelled waist stepping closer to know the same, now that she was interested that the solo flyer mascara-goop-girl spoke Italian.
If she hadn’t moved closer, she then would not have noticed the book in my hand with awe and helped me in the evasion of the young Italian boy’s question, to which my response could not have, for the life of me, been specific and reasonable enough for him to understand at his free rider age with his skateboarder hair and pointy Paciotti shoes.
I then would not have engaged in her conversation with me about the weird Japanese author of the book I was reading, nor would I have choked up when I recalled to her that I had just lost my father-in-law who introduced this author to me and how I never got the chance to ask him if he had read this specific book, nor would she have been so random in her telling me about the brown wooden library cabinets in the farm cottage home of her childhood years in Venezuela, in which her father was killed and where life could not continue for her and from which she finally fled to marry an idle Swiss man that left no room for sadness- hinting to me, through her brief story, to move on with life, and quit being sulky.
The young Italian boy, still oblivious to the pains of life, would then not have clapped his hands once and sarcastically hollered “Grande!” to snap us ladies, soon to be joining him on his same flight, out of their self-piteous sad airport moment, nor would he have felt obliged to change such a random heavy subject in a conversation he had meant to start with me to begin with, by asking the lady enfolded in the red flannel shirt if she had ever surfed in Venezuela, and the lady would then never have had answered that she did, in fact, not only surf, but also compete as a surfer when she was a young girl in Margarita.
They would then not have naturally talked about the happier things in life like surfing spots in Venezuela, introducing themselves to me as Martin and Dalilah, exchanging Facebook details and asking for mine which I gave, silently holding back my tears for a short while before they poured, as I remembered my father in law’s surfing adventures with my husband in Margarita; and the lady enveloped in that – actually quiet large – red flannel shirt would not have had no choice besides circling one arm around me in comfort inviting the Italian boy to do the same, whereupon he towered taller than us to hug us both and mark the beginning of a lifelong cyber friendship.
Whether it was I cried, or tripped on Martin’s shoes, or lost a boarding pass that fell from my book, or happened to be carrying that very book which resonated with Dalilah; this alliance would not have come together if there was not an insensible public breakdown, clumsiness in tripping over long shoes and dropping an important piece of paper from a seemingly less important book, and genuine invasive curiosity of why someone’s tears are so many that they clumped her mascara in the corner of one eye.
Four years later, some time very close to today, I would then never have been there to help Martin persevere through his father’s diagnosis and later on grieve over his loss, nor would I have been known to Dalilah to give her the contact details of the only doctor that saves her life from the “C word” that leeched into her reproductive organs like a growing fetus.
Life is full of meaningful mathematical patterns; I often ponder on whether these patterns are prefixed formulas drawing out our whole non-variable destiny- like a fixed number of petals of a certain type of flower, or like a fixed amount of spots on a certain species of an animal- or whether we express the formulas ourselves when we make the variable choice to approach a stranger at one point in life, only to find them become part of our constant pattern at a further stage of it.
by Beisan A. Alshafei
Written in around June 2019
Beisan's Burble 