RIP Airport Romance

I'm on vacation with my grandparents in New York for a couple of weeks, and I'm not going to put much effort into this post. My first flight was delayed by two and a half hours, which would cause me to miss my second flight, so American Airlines' system automatically rebooked me on an overnight flight arriving at 6 a.m. without telling me. The bag check-in lady was able to get me on another delayed flight to Dallas instead of Chicago, and I made to the end of the boarding line with a few minutes to spare. I would like to add my complaint to the many complaints about the Salt Lake airport. I cannot comprehend why I had to walk through empty space for twenty minutes to get to my gate. Why the hell didn't they put the gates in that empty space instead of the empty space? How the hell did this arrangement get designed, approved, and built? I hope everyone involved never works in their respective industries again.

So now I've been to Texas. I have no other reason to want to go to Texas because its governor is a bellend. I had five hours to kill at the airport because my second rescheduled flight was, of course, delayed, and I walked around for a while and I worked on the new book that I just started for a while. I sat with my computer at a charging station by the gate and paid no attention to the pretty young woman seated across from me until a guy across the room yelled at his kids for running around, and I looked over there, and she grinned at me and said, "They're losing their shit!" And I said I couldn't blame them for being bored, and she agreed. And then it occurred to me that I could keep talking to her by asking how long she'd been delayed and stuff, but it also occurred to me that just because a woman spoke to me didn't mean she wanted to have a whole conversation, so I didn't. She went back to her work, and then she went off somewhere.

When it was time to board, I was in the second-to-last group, so I didn't get in line. She returned and also didn't get in line. As I waited, my eyes wandered around and didn't look at her. But then they did look at her, and it seems like she was looking at me before that, because she immediately looked away as an involuntary smile sprouted on her face. I mean, I wasn't in her head and I don't know what the synapses in her brain were doing, but her smile looked involuntary based on my short lifetime of observations and personal experience. I've had the exact same reaction when someone I found attractive looked at me. So this brought me to the realization that, against all odds, she probably found me attractive. Though unusual, this would not be unprecedented. I've been asked to ladies' choice dances. I've been flirted with and realized it years later. That girl in the USU library in 2013 who started a friendly conversation by asking me about a simple point of grammar that she could have taken a few seconds to look up on her computer was probably flirting with me.

I kept waiting for this pretty young woman to get in line, but she kept not getting in line, so I got in line and then she got in line right behind me. And the line moved slowly, and I made a point of pretending not to notice or care about her presence, although sometimes I would turn my head so I could kind of see her and she could see that I could see her and she could talk to me if she wanted. I didn't dare to talk to her. Bad things happen to me when I have that kind of confidence. I imagined her getting on one of the feminist subreddits I frequent and complaining that she can't go out in public without men being attracted to her. Really, I see complaints like that. Apparently some women hate being approached by men in public at all, even if the men don't harass them or refuse to take no for an answer. And they hate it when their guy friends turn out to be attracted to them, even if their guy friends don't harass them or refuse to take no for an answer. Maybe I'm a misogynist for not feeling even a little bit sorry for those women.

As she stood behind me in line and I let her into my peripheral vision, this woman twirled a lock of her hair in an exaggerated manner. This was a less obvious sign of attraction, since I couldn't prove that it had anything to do with me, but nobody else was twirling their hair, and it's such a well-established sign of attraction that it inspired a hilarious Argentinian commercial where a guy has dinner with his girlfriend's family and charms her mother, grandmother, and father so much that they all do it. (Her father has short hair, but he grows a long lock just for that shot.) I became hopeful that since we seemed to be in the same boarding category, we would sit together, and then it wouldn't be weird for me to talk to her. Her seat was several rows up from mine. I decided I would muster my courage during the three-hour flight and talk to her at the baggage claim. She wasn't at the baggage claim. I hate being me.

She probably thinks I wasn't attracted to her and/or failed to pick up on her signals. The first one isn't true, and surprisingly, neither is the second. A third, less likely possibility is that she thinks I'm a weird Republican who refused to flirt back without verification of her chromosomes. I don't want her to think those things. But because I think almost constantly about death and what may await us afterward, it occurred to me almost immediately that maybe when she dies she'll have one of those life reviews that many people describe after they die and come back, and she'll revisit our brief moments together and see my thoughts and feelings and finally know the truth. Maybe she'll know that I thought she was very pretty. Maybe she'll know that her unsolicited vulgar remark gave me a positive impression of her personality. And maybe she'll glimpse the ocean of trauma that made me fear her more than I fear being alone.