Flight 472

It’s drizzling outside my window.

The sky is gray and cloudy, casting strange shadows on the rooftops. The headlights of the cars reflect eerily off the damp pavement. A car alarm goes off as I zip my suitcase shut and hoist it off my bed. I’m running late. My Uber driver has been waiting for ten minutes, and I’m certain that’s going to cost me extra.

I run out of the door to my apartment and to the elevator. The doors are closing when my neighbor, whom I’ve never met before, rushes to the door. I grudgingly hold the doors open and he steps inside, holding a cat carrier.

I’m allergic to cats.

I try to not breathe in too deeply as the elevator descends. I’m already racing against the clock to catch my flight; I don’t want to ruin my trip any further by breaking out in hives.

The doors slide open and I rush out. There’s a black Honda sitting outside the glass apartment doors, and I recognize it from my driver’s description.

“Sorry you had to wait so long,” I say when I climb in.

The driver, a young Hispanic man, nods curtly and pulls away from my apartment.

It’s a quiet drive. The traffic is thick, which isn’t ideal. My flight leaves in two hours, and security is always a nightmare. I regret staying up so late last night and sleeping through my alarm.

We arrive at the airport half an hour before my flight leaves. I thank and pay my driver and run into the terminal. The check-in line is unbelievably long, so I step up to a self check-in kiosk. The buttons are slow and unresponsive, and it takes me forever to input my information. Eventually, I print my tickets and run to security. Maybe my flight will be delayed.

No such luck.

I’m not through security before there’s a last call for flight 472 to London. That’s it. I’ve missed my flight.

I have spent months planning this trip. I set aside all of my vacation days at work and made sure that everything was caught up. I hired a pet sitter to take care of Charlie, my betta fish. I spent so much money planning everything, and in the end, this is what I get. A missed flight.

I break down in the bathroom after I get through security, crying into wads of toilet paper. I call another Uber to pick me up, and, after collecting myself for a moment, walk back through the terminal and to the parking lot.

Flight 472 crashed into the Atlantic ocean. There were no survivors.