Before you realize it the time to leave has arrived, and suddenly everything is a blur of activity. The cab to the airport. The standing in line to check in. The wait to pass through security. Long periods of waiting in the departure lounge before you finally board your plane. The rush to get to your seat, where you sit as the plane waits on the tarmac, a variety of assorted noises coming from under the cabin floor as the ground crew did who knows what down there with the luggage. You wouldn’t have thought of yourself as a nervous flyer, although you’d only been on one flight before ,back when you were six and the family had spent three weeks with your Uncle James out in Boulder, right before the cancer took him. Before your thoughts could travel too far along that maudlin road the captain came on the intercom, speaking in the calm practiced pilots voice they all have, apologizing for the delay and giving a rundown of the flight information, which you half listened to then promptly forgot as the cabin crew went through their little safety procedure demo. At long last the plane was pushed out of the terminal and started it’s rumbling trudge down the taxiways towards the take-off point. This journey too seemed to take forever, and at one point Billy, ever the joker, commented that it looked like you must have gotten on a bus by mistake, and maybe they were planning on driving all the way to Europe.
For a while it seemed as if you would never get off the ground. Then the pitch of the engines wound up, the whining drone became a roar, and you were pushed back into your seat. The rumbling and shaking of the plane grew more intense until it suddenly died away completely. You were off the ground and headed into the great blue yonder.
The next several hours were a mix of heady excitement and tedious boredom.
You chatted excitedly with your friends, fidgeted. Read the in-flight magazine. The small screen in the head rest in front of you was playing an assortment of movies, all of which you had seen before and were not to interested in watching again. You dug out the copy of your favorite book, and generally tried to pass the time. A passage in the book reminded you of the mysterious letter, nestled in your luggage stowed in the belly of the plane somewhere below you. When you mentioned it to your friends you all managed to kill a good half hour speculating who sent it and what it could possibly say, before growing board with the topic and turning back to flipping idly through the in-flight entertainment channels to pass the time.
At long last, groggy from too little sleep yet still riding the crest of excitement, you found yourself standing in the baggage claim watching for your luggage to show up.
After a while you start to worry. It’s been several minutes and none of your distinctively coloured back packs have shown up.
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