She could barely stand it. Patience was not her strong suit, and she’d waited for so long.
‘Not long now,’ she thought to herself as she looked around at all the other waiting people. She wondered how many loved ones were being waited upon. She figured probably a lot, but she also figured that most of these loved ones had already met the people waiting for them.
The Internet was at once both amazing and horrifying, but she chose to focus on the amazing. Amazing in that people could find friends, build relationships, and even fall in love without ever having met or touched each other in real space.
But soon she would finally be able to touch Her. The one for whom she had waited, ever so patiently, for so long. For years even. A few minutes more paled in comparison to that.
But her loved one was so close, tantalisingly close.
She checked the Arrivals board yet again, as she had done numerous times over the hour she’d been waiting. It said Landed next to her loved one’s flight.
Already there was no ‘homophobic border’ between them, to borrow a phrase from the Internet through which they’d met. They’d had the entire world between them, and now her loved one was out there on the tarmac somewhere, so close, yet still far away.
Waiting was always painful for her, but waiting for her loved one had taken that pain to new heights.
While it would be no lie to say that they’d both sacrificed a lot to finally be able to touch each other, to hug, to kiss, to sit next to each other in companionable silence, just soaking in each other’s presence. It was more true that her loved one, sitting in an passenger plane, with its cramped seating in the pressurized narrow metal tube, held aloft by human ingenuity and the roaring deafening sound of its engines, and, of course, the inordinate financial cost of such an endeavour, had made the greater sacrifice.
The Arrivals board ticked over, changing from Landed to Gate B-6. Her excitement rose to fever pitch, as she made her way to that Arrivals Gate.
Shortly, in reality, but an eternity to her, passengers started filing out of the bridge connecting the plane to the terminal. She watched as loved ones reconnected, hugs and kisses were all around her.
And then it happened.
She was there. Right there! She could see her loved one with her own eyes. Not on a screen, not in a photo, but right there! She bounced a bit and rushed forward.
“There you are!” she said, buzzing with anticipation, as she approached her loved one.
Her loved one smiled that amazing smile, “Here I am,” she said with a huge grin.
A momentary awkwardness ensued as they both hesitated in making physical contact, but then slowly and all of a sudden, they were hugging. And then they kissed.
It was phenomenal, she’d kissed other people before of course, but this was different. The distance, the waiting, her being here finally, made it all the more sweeter. They lingered, mouths and tongues excitedly exploring each other, before one of them, whose to say which, finally realised they were in a public place, and then disappointingly, painfully, parted.
Holding hands, she said to her loved one, “Let’s get you home…”
They smiled at each other, and left the Arrival area, for yet another journey, shorter but together.