thirty minutes

She glanced at the clock on the wall, but there was still thirty minutes before his flight would land, which meant thirty more minutes of twiddling her thumbs and fixing her hair and staring at the passerby on the escalators and by the baggage claim, all hugging the arrivals and smiling and waiting to leave, which is just what she wanted to be doing but the clock was laughing at her…he hadn’t been in this particular airport for two months, and she hadn’t felt the funny anxious feeling like this in that long either, and now her palms were sweating and senses felt alert and her heart felt like pounding out of her chest, — and then she saw them: a man and a woman waiting a few feet away, coming towards each other in the middle of this crowd of strangers to lock in a tight embrace and kiss each other and bask in each other, and she thought she was seeing a projection of herself with the same giddy smile and wide eyes filled with utter hope and love, and she felt her eyes well up and she laughed at herself, and the clock ticked above her and as she peered down the long walkway in front of her as more and more strangers filtered out, the ground began to shake underneath her and the hanging lights were swinging to and fro and the people were all interrupted from their merriment to feel the earth shake, and just as quickly as it started it stopped, like it had never happened at all, and the people shook off the scared looks and held each other tighter, while she eyed the clock again and wondered if her perfume, his favorite scent, would still be on her and if the butterflies would seize up in her and make her dizzy and light headed when she saw him, and why in the world the building shook so hard when she thought this is the end, and I will never see him because we will all die in this freak seismic quake, and how jealous she felt of the man and woman who met who would feel each other again one last time while she only felt the cold of the tile floor and the harshness of the swinging fluorescent light, and while all of these thoughts were occupying her mind, a man came up to her side and asked her the time, and she casually glanced at the clock and told him the time, and then realizing what time it was she snapped to attention, then snapped to her left at the man, and there he was, being so calm and collected and smug waiting to see how long it would take for her to realize it was him, and she smiled her contagious and unbelievable smile and he showed his teeth back and pulled her in close while she breathed in his scent she had missed and rubbed her hand on his silly haircut that she loved only on him and not on the thousands of other men that dawned the same look, and she reached up on her tippy toes because she was so small in comparison, and locked her lips with his and this was the moment she had thought about so many days and nights before in between her worrying and her thoughts and it was nothing like how she had imagined it, like the two would run up in a field of poppies that somehow exploded through the concrete ground at the airport and all the strangers would be gone and the two of them could embrace in their own world and fall down in a heap of love and intertwine themselves right then and there, and instead he was there for god knows how long while she was pondering other people’s lives, but she didn’t care at all because it was a perfect moment anyways as he took her hand and led her to the baggage claim while she merely followed star struck and dumbfounded, not being able to find the words that she seemed to have in her mind only minutes before, and he asked if she were alright, and she nodded and blinked and said the only thing she could think of, and it was I’m glad your not dead, and he cocked his head strangely before the two of them laughed loudly and affectionately in between kisses and nuzzles and everything she had been waiting for.