Objects in motion

*The following is a true story that is also a sequel to this previously published story. The first story was only slightly fictionalized. This one is all true.

Of all the flights in all the airports in all the world, she had to be on his.

The last few days had been emotionally exhausting, to say the least. She was the absolute last thing he needed, or expected to see.

His best friends had announced their intentions to move to Atlanta several months prior. This was for the best, he knew. The neighborhood they were moving into was much safer, the housing market was much cheaper and the schools were far better. His beloved niece and nephew would have a better life. But there is a difference between knowing a thing and accepting it. He knew all these things were true, but he was still having a hard time accepting them.

As the months passed, he had come to an understanding. This is life... love, loss and transition. They weren't gone forever, obviously. There would be opportunities to see each other. But selfishly he realized that this was another moment of transition for him. It wasn't just their moving. Other things were changing in his life. For the first time in years, he felt unmoored from the world, unsure of his place in it. The uncertainty and anxiety that had plagued him his entire life filled his chest. The weight nearly made him collapse at times.

The day came... or rather the evening. He'd taken off of work, listing "family matters" as the reason. It was truth, if not fact. Immediately after work, he and his best friend had set to loading the last few things into the obscenely large rental truck. A few others had been there to help them load the rest in the days prior. The two of them traversed the narrow, shaking ramp up to the truck bed carrying a heavy mattress. With one giant heft, they tossed the thing onto the rest of the family's life and closed the door.

The children's maternal grandmother wept as she weakly waved goodbye. The family car took off carrying the kids, their mother and paternal grandmother. The two of them climbed aboard the yellow behemoth and drove into the long night and a brighter tomorrow.

While he still wasn't happy about them moving, he did enjoy the drive. His best friend and he had taken many such road trips over the last 20 years. They had been from one side of the country to the other. Their friendship was filled with adventures. Many was the time those adventures had left them on the side of the road with a broken down vehicle. As memorable as those particular moments were, he quietly hoped events would not repeat themselves. This was their last road trip together. There was nowhere else he'd rather have been.

The night was filled with the heavy beat of rain, but the skies opened up the next morning.

Friday was a haze. There was an inspection of the new house, the mortgage signing and a quick airport run to pick up the children's Aunt... and that was all before unloading the truck. The six of them, plus their two pint-sized helpers slowly unloaded their life into the new house. After about 45 minutes, he had to sit down for a few minutes. His was not a body that one would look at and think "That guy should be moving heavy furniture." He ended up sitting down a lot during the move and it embarrassed him. But then, better embarrassed than in cardiac arrest.

Through all of this, he tried not to think about the girl. This was an easy task during the day. The nights were more difficult. He barely slept as he lay on their sofa. In the quiet of the night, his problems whispered in his ear. Their trip to Pensacola had been a couple of weeks prior. They hadn't spoken since, but the trip had finally convinced him that their relationship -such as it was- was no longer tenable. He had intended to talk to her about it, but the opportunity was never there. Or maybe he was just delaying the inevitable. People often thought of him as confrontational. This couldn't be further from the truth. Even when he knew he was right, arguments often led to his stomach being tied into knots.

He was being slowly tortured by everything that happened. Eventually he decided he had to manifest it, before it drove him mad. He wrote a short story and posted it to his Linked-In page, which was mostly attempted business connections. The irony is that his pain got him loads of compliments from strangers online. He considered it a pyrrhic victory.

With nothing else to do during the Atlanta night, he checked his Linked-In page. There was an alert that someone new had looked at it. Her. Having posted the story more than a week prior, he wasn't sure she saw the story. After a few minutes, he decided to test it. Sure enough, she had deleted him from her facebook page. He laughed at how silly it all was. In the 21st century there was no surer sign of an ended relationship than your facebook status. But there it was. Christopher Robin had decided she was done with her Pooh Bear. She closed the book without ever considering saying goodbye. Part of him had been wondering if that was how she would end it. The rest of him was just hoping it was his paranoia talking.

It wasn't as bad as he had expected. He'd spent the last couple of weeks wrestling with all of it. Having it end so abruptly and without the slightest fanfare hurt, but he was well into it by then. What was a little more pain? The next morning his best friend's wife had seen the look on his face and asked him what was wrong. She was a good woman and a good friend. He suspected she knew before she even asked, but he told her it was nothing. "I'm fine." She wanted to press further, but as a kindness, let it rest.

And though the end of his not-a-relationship was in the back of his mind, he went on about things. He had precious little time to spend with his family and chose not to waste it dwelling on a silly girl who didn't care enough to cut his heart out from the front.

One blessing was the presence of his best friend's sister. He had always found her very attractive. She was beautiful and kind. Of course, this isn't that kind of story. She was married with kids. He was a redneck falling to pieces. Despite the Hallmark Channel's narratives, those two people weren't going to get together.

Even so, it was a nice reminder that he hadn't become jaded by current events. There were still women out there and women could be wonderful. The last thing he wanted was to become his father. After the divorce, his old man had insisted that women were things to be used and discarded. He often wondered if his dad had ever considered how damaging it could be to foist those issues off on his then-teenage son? And in the end it was all talk. His father never became a womanizer. For all his father's bluster and rage, his mother was the only woman he ever loved. For the second time that weekend, he prayed for history not to repeat itself.

For their part, his niece and nephew were a holy terror. They alternated between melting down and being so adorable as to take one's breath away. Their parents liked to travel, so they were used to being far away. For them, this was an adventure... a particularly wonderful one, as they didn't often have the chance to spend so much time with their Aunt and Grandmother. They didn't understand that the moments wouldn't last forever. Soon they would all move on, leaving the family to their new life. He took as many photos of these moments as he could without annoying everyone. "This is what matters" he thought. "It's important to preserve them."

The weekend seemed to last forever, but eventually his alarm went off and it was time for him to leave.

Despite dawn having barely been broken, the Atlanta airport was packed. He was starving by the time he had gotten to his terminal and immediately realized he'd made a mistake by not stopping before he got there. The only open vendors were Chick-fil-A and Starbucks, each with a line of people so long they could've stormed an island nation. Instead he settled on a can of pringles from the gift shop. He sat in the least populated section of seats by his plane gate. He dreaded his return to reality. He was tired and hungry and had no desire to go to work that day. Shirking responsibilities wasn't in the cards. Real life awaited. He tried to drown out the sound with music, turning up a mellow playlist of songs from his personal collection. Not long after, they called his group to line up for boarding. He began to stand and out of the corner of his eye, something stirred. Something familiar was there. The impact of the realization would have been enough to knock him on his ass.

It was her. Her.

She had been literally sitting across from him for who knows how long. "What a cruel world" he thought. "What a life." He always hated moments like this. Things that were far too improbable to dismiss, but logically were just coincidences. It was like God was trying to tell him something, but speaking in Vietnamese. Now, he wasn't a moron. This wasn't impossible, just improbable. They were both traveling that weekend and both tended to use the same airline. But she was flying in from a different state. Atlanta was the largest airline hub in the US, but still...

What was he supposed to do?

They called his group again. He rose and walked past her to the end of the line. "Should I say something?" He wanted to. Something. Anything. He didn't want to scream... just something. Maybe even just "Really? You're sitting across from me and you aren't going to say anything?" But what would that accomplish. It also occurred to him that they were in an airport. He had what he laughingly referred to as "Resting Serial Killer Face" and any sort of confrontation with a woman in an airport could have easily landed him in jail, no matter the innocence of his intent. Since he didn't want to be tackled by a Sky Marshall at 7 am, he reconsidered his options. Just then the voice of Kate Voegele played in his ears. "Forever and Almost Always" was a song he loved and had introduced her to a while back. It was a song about someone in a relationship who kept accepting the person's bad behavior in the name of love. At the end, she accepts that she deserves better and moves on. The irony was comical and he laughed accordingly. Again, it was his playlist, so this wasn't a miracle happening. Still, the timing felt important. She got up and walked past him, but if she hadn't known he was there before, she knew then. When she stopped, she made sure there was pillar blocking his view of her. It was so ridiculous and childish that he could hardly stand it.

They boarded the plane. He went towards the back of the half-filled plane. Fat people generally prefer aisle seats whenever possible. She stopped 3 rows before him, never glancing in his direction. The entire line of passengers stopped behind her as she attempted to shove her multiple pieces of luggage into the overhead compartment. "What an asshole." he thought. They'd travelled together many times before, but never in a plane. He never realized that she was one of those people he couldn't stand. Rather than checking her luggage, she would inconvenience others at every turn. Truthfully, he also rarely checked baggage, but tended only towards one bag that could easily be placed and removed without holding everyone up.

When the plane took off, his music was still playing. He was relaxed, but anxious. He decided it would be cowardly to say nothing, but foolish to make a scene. By the time the plane landed in New Orleans, he had his plan together. As soon as the "unbuckle seatbelt" light came on, she shot up out of her seat, determined to get off as quickly as possible. She never turned in his direction once, and he knew he would never get a chance to look her in the eye.

Instead, he sent a simple text.

You don't have to worry about seeing me. I had a revelation on the plane. I'm the Christopher Robin of this story. Fare thee well, Pooh.

He saw her look down when the text was sent. To her credit, she didn't react in the slightest. Whether her feelings were anger or indifference, he couldn't say. But it didn't matter. She knew he would no longer pine for her. He realized his worth.

She zipped off the plane as soon as possible. He took his time. He walked out into a terminal filled with people who had no idea what just happened in front of them. This wasn't a story of endings, he realized. It was a story of beginnings.