Tears at the Airport

Here’s one thing you should know about me: I don’t cry. Okay, every time I watch the Little Mermaid, but that doesn’t count. Well, and sometimes during Hallmark commercials, but really, I don’t cry. People think I’m cold, like a robot. Sometimes, they study my face when CNN talks about people dying in an earthquake or someone’s baby being taken by wolves, and when they get no reaction, they shrug their shoulders as if to say, “your guess is as good as mine.”

But when my mom waved goodbye from her car, just as the doors to the airport were closing, I choked, as if I were half vomiting, half sobbing. I started to cry. I had to look away, disconnect from the source of my sadness and then I was fine. But in Chicago, when my dad, who had been suffering from a cold, flew there from Indiana just to say goodbye, it about did me in. For one, I was suddenly closer to the reality of what I was doing. I was leaving. Not forever, but for the first time, for real. We stood in line together at the security checkpoint, and decided four different times to skip to the back just to have more time together. “Okay, this time it’s for real,” we’d promise.

“How about one more time?”

We waved to each other and blew air kisses about forty times and finally the man behind me in the security line said, “Is this what I’m going to have to look forward to when my daughter leaves one day?”

I explained that I’m an only child and the love of my parents’ lives, and, equally, they are the love of mine. He seemed choked up himself. Turns out, he was from Indiana, just about 15 minutes from where my dad lives.

Most people might find it hard to believe I’m 30 and not 14, and that I’m entitled to my own life and that maybe I should’ve actually begun living it long ago but that’s just not how it works in my life. Sort of by choice, sort of by birth. Either way, I’ve come to accept that my life, golden as it is, is shared 100% by the people who put me on this planet. I know God or some higher power had the greatest influence in my birth, but I’m more than positive that whilst in heaven I chose them. The line was as long as the security cues I’d been standing in off and on all day. It looked hopeless. I was too honest to skip to the front of the line and when I began to think all the other kids would get my parents first, I started to cry.

“Why are you crying, Stefanie?” God asked.

“Because someone else will take my family,” I said.

“Don’t you know, dear child, that they are already yours? They always were and always will be. It doesn’t matter where you stand in line. Destiny always finds you.”