Lilly
I sit for my last exam at eight in the morning. It’s astronomy, so I’m done by nine, dropping off my paper and curling up on a couch in the physics wing to wait for my friends. My professor comes by with my test not 15 minutes later, to show me my mistakes (small, and quickly repaired, although not for my grade) and say goodbye before the break. “When are you leaving?” he asks.
“This afternoon,” I tell him.
“Oh, no.” He chuckles. “You think you’re getting home this afternoon.”
He’s right. The snow has already begun to fall by the time my friends and I leave for the airport. My first flight is delayed only long enough to de-ice the plane before takeoff. My second flight changes gates four times and is pushed back 30, 60, 90 minutes before we finally board, and even then we’ve just barely finishing taxiing when the call comes from the airport: turn back. Everything has been cancelled for the next 36 hours, they tell us as we deplane. Landing conditions are just too bad at our destination to risk a flight.
So here I am, tantalizingly close to home, only three hours by car, barely 20 minutes if we had made it into the air. But I am not at home, and I am sitting on the floor of the airport commiserating with a girl also supposed to be on my flight, our luggage stacked beside us, neither of us with any plan for the night but to wait and wait and wait.
Someone says, “Lilly?”
I look up and one of my childhood friends is staring back at me with his head tipped to one side. Oh my god! “We used to play soccer together,” I explain to the girl I’d befriended as everyone introduces themselves.
“I took her best friend to prom,” he says.
“What are your plans now that the flight’s been cancelled?”
“I think I’m getting a hotel—”
Somehow I end up paying him 40 bucks to take the other bed in his hotel room. The other girl tags along with us just long enough to book a bus home, sneak in a nap, and tiptoe out of the room in the wee hours of the morning. I get up to shower and stand in the bathroom with the door locked for a long time, wondering what fortune must have been with me the previous night for things to align so perfectly. Maybe this is what being an adult is—taking advantage of weird coincidences, making the best out of bad situations. Taking chances. Acting spontaneously. It’s the most independent I’ve felt in a long time, and I just finished my first semester of college.
It all works out. When we go back to the airport to get his luggage, we end up running into another mutual friend who hitches a ride back home with us. He buys us bagels in gratitude as we stand around waiting. “My bus was supposed to leave at 10,” he says with a mouthful of bread. “But my flight landed at 9:58. Luck was not on my side today.”
“OK, well, you haven’t been stranded here all night,” I laugh.
He talks about his biophysics and real analysis classes and how he’s seriously considering declaring the physics major. I tell him about my upcoming astrophysics research and “hey, I’m taking complex analysis next semester,” and suddenly we have a lot more in common than I remember. When I get home the streets are coated in ice and I understand why my flight never got off the ground last night. But everything lined up so well. And now I’m home, and sleeping in my own bed, and for once I feel like I have earned a day or two of complete rest. No linear algebra homework, no poster presentation or physics exam hanging over my head. Just eons spent in the warmth beneath my quilt, knitting, watching bad television, reading to my heart’s content.
Winter break never felt like this much of a break. ♦