The loss of a story hits harder than the loss of an object. I can’t find it. I can’t find it anywhere. And yet I remember writing it, every gleeful moment, as I glanced up over and over at the handsome flight attendant.
Glad to be short, I had peered over the seat in front of me, just two dark eyes staring steadily ahead. He too was short, but his presence felt larger than life. It was the guarded expression he wore, the facade of professionalism that was placed neatly but not perfectly over a face that leaked humanity.
But I can’t remember. It’s gone, spread out somewhere in the mess of nerve endings. When I saw him, I began to tap frantically on my phone, inventing worlds for this young man at the front. You see, there was also a girl. And he looked at this girl with a carefulness that caught me. I was hooked, like a grandmother in front of a telenovela. I watched her watch him. I watched him studiously not watch her. I watched him turn and watch her the moment she left. It was gut-wrenching and real and unreal.
But selfishly, I am not invested in their future. I have no need to know whether he ends up making a move. I don’t care if he finally looks at her while she looks back at him. It doesn’t matter to me if he leans in and tugs at a brown lock of hair, looking at it as if it were magic, closing the distance between them. It won’t bother me if he continues this sad charade, never speaking to the girl on the ground, if he flies away from this potential future, alone in the sky. What I care about is my story. In that moment, it was so strong, it was more real to me than reality. I felt as if I bottled his essence, as if I captured his soul and had it pinned to the page like a butterfly. I was invisible, an anthropological observer, trying to understand the underpinnings of the human heart.
But now, I am just a writer with a lost story, empty-handed.
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