I splashed water on my face and wiped the anxiety from my lip. I looked into the mirror and straightened my hat. She mailed it to me on my birthday, a red baseball cap with RUSSIA half in raised red letters, and the letters U, S, and A in white. It was a warming gesture between freezing nations, but the hat was red and said Russia, and the people strained to see more. The smell of airport bathroom cinnamon flipped my stomach. She's in the air thirty hours and I'm the one getting sick. Thirty hours. To see me. To meet me. I thought of better people, and family, that I didn't fly one hour to see. I thought of funerals missed and friends forgotten. Is she really coming? Did she really get on that plane? Am I being taken? My heart sank while I became suspicious all over again.
I looked into my face and thought of the silent promises made: to look better, wear more sunscreen, and even out my beard. Each a weight on my chest to shorten my breath. I closed my eyes and inhaled deliberately. I ripped a sheet of towel to wipe my face and left the restroom to head for the gate, but I felt little shreds of brown paper towel on my face and ran back inside to the mirror. Nothing there. I exhaled.
“What's yours?” asked the barkeep.
“Meeting an old friend for the first time,” I said softly, my eyes down low.
“Vodka-tonic.” I smelled my breath. “Vanilla, if you have it.”
“Who's the friend?” He turned his back and made the drink.
“I'm not really sure.”
“Another crazy,” I heard him say as he left me my drink and disappeared through a door. I looked around the bar. It was almost empty. The airport was smaller and quieter than most, and I felt the difference. A young man in his twenties approached the bar and sat down, leaving the socially requisite space between us. His headphones were loud and his attention elsewhere, and I saw I could finally speak without reproach.
“We've been talking for a year, but I still waver between feeling like I've known her forever, and not at all.” He nodded in agreement.
“She's not just beautiful, though she is, very much, but she shines from within, in a special way. She guzzles from life like she knows it won't last, but knows how to sip, too, and when. And she sees the world.” He listened attentively, and offered no insults, no assumptions.
“She was studying the language for a scholarship, and she found me to help. She needed a tutor. I needed a friend.” He sipped from his glass and ruminated on this line while I went to the next.
“Most importantly, when she finds herself in the darkness, she remembers to light a match, and when she forgets the world is beautiful, she lets it remind her.” With this, I knew he understood.
I cursed the ease I allowed myself to find when the sign I finally found had read 'Arrived.' The numbers and letters began to float away into a soup, like dream-legs running from a nightly terror. I ran to just before the point of breaking sweat and then walked and quick as I could get to the gate where I presumed she'd be, where now there stood but none and me.
When I came to the baggage claim area, I stood out of view to gather some sight. I barely looked for a moment when I saw a girl wearing the screaming colors I knew from the photos of Siberian buildings whose architecture I had grown to love. My body knew this was her, even if my mind was riddled with doubt, and it walked on its own, with no direction from me, toward this otherworldly being before me who struggled with a bag stuck to the turnstile. And as I got nearer she stopped with her bag and good things came to those who waited as she turned around.
Our eyes met and we spoke silently there. The grooves and notches in our eyes were a perfect match and they fit together like gears on a machine. When they locked into place they began to turn and opened the gates of our inner speech and as the levees breached, torrents of silent waves were unleashed and they came crashing as two opposing systems creating a storm, and we braced ourselves and weathered the hurricane of our eyes. And though I should have been overwhelmed, my dizzy mind knew peace. When the waters calmed I floated down this sacred river, time and place stretched on for years and miles, setting every neuron ablaze and warming the blood from within. And when I had almost all I could bare the waters dried up and she began to speak in the usual way:
“Hello, it's nice to meet you,” and her voice and many faces were a new drug and I imbibed deeply of her. She overspoke the “u” and it hung in the air and the viscerality of the moment exceeded the threshold of my self containment, and molten energy erupted from my crust and came now as a laugh and I saw her stiffen out of embarrassment or shock; but my tear and my smile and my hand with her hand all spoke and whispered 'Beautiful' in her ear and she heard the universal word and knew its meaning; ah love, our Rosetta Stone in a time of Babel.
I heard this mistake before but never in person and now the reality of two more weeks of beautiful mistakes seemed a gift to me from somewhere I didn't quite deserve, and I decided I could live here forever in this moment if I needed. I slung her bags around my shoulder and walked towards the giant wall of glass surrounding the exit. Pikes Peak and the Front Range of Colorado plumed their feathers for a newcomer's eye, and as she saw the mountains I recognized the face of one who sees the sublime, and it was both familiar and rare, and I smiled selfishly for every old pleasure I would see again through her eyes. I recognized a pure moment and sipped slowly, letting it roll about my tongue, and as we walked out of the airport her hand found mine and a tourniquet tied years before had been loosened and a new euphoria rushed through my veins.
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