I met her on a random Tuesday night at the Denver airport — not that we really met, exactly. It was one of those layovers that felt longer than your entire life. My flight to Portland had been delayed for three hours, so I was sitting at the bar near Gate C27, half-drunk on overpriced whiskey, half-bored from scrolling through old texts I probably shouldn’t have reread.
Then she sat down next to me. Black hoodie, messy bun, a carry-on that looked like it had survived a war. She asked the bartender for a gin and tonic, “light on the gin,” and smiled like she already knew the world wasn’t going to give her what she wanted but she’d ask anyway.
I remember thinking, okay, maybe this layover won’t kill me after all.
We didn’t talk at first. She was typing fast on her phone, maybe texting someone. I was pretending not to watch her reflection in the bar mirror. Then her drink came, she took a sip, and said, “You look like you’ve been here for days.”
“Feels like it,” I said. “I might start paying rent.”
She laughed — that easy, surprised kind of laugh that doesn’t sound practiced. I told her I’d been stuck since 4 p.m., and she said her flight to Nashville was supposed to leave at six but kept getting pushed back. We bonded over misery, which, honestly, is the most American kind of small talk.
After that, the conversation just… flowed. We talked about travel, jobs, music. She told me she was a photographer who shot small-town festivals and roadside diners, the kind of places people drive past without ever noticing. I told her I did freelance design work — which sounds cooler than it is — and she said, “So basically, both of us spend too much time staring at screens and airports.”
The bartender changed the TV to a basketball game. She groaned, said she hated sports, then proceeded to tell me about her dad who used to drag her to every high school game in their town. “I think I just wanted to see the cheerleaders,” she joked, sipping her drink.
Somewhere between her second gin and my third whiskey, it stopped feeling like small talk. I told her about my recent breakup. She told me about a fiancé she almost married last year but didn’t. We didn’t trade names — not intentionally, just… it didn’t come up. It was like naming it would ruin whatever fragile, temporary magic we had.
At one point she said, “It’s weird, right? How airports are like time doesn’t count. You can talk to a stranger and it doesn’t feel real.”
I said, “Maybe that’s what makes it feel real.”
She smiled at that, but didn’t say anything.
When the loudspeaker finally announced boarding for Flight 207 to Nashville, she looked up like she’d forgotten she even had a destination. She sighed, grabbed her bag, and said, “Guess that’s me.”
I wanted to ask for her number. I thought about it — really thought about it — but there was something about the way she looked at me. Like if I asked, it would break the spell. Like maybe this was meant to stay suspended, incomplete.
So I just said, “Safe flight.”
She hesitated for a second, then said, “You too,” even though my flight wasn’t leaving for another hour. Then she was gone, walking down the jet bridge, vanishing into that anonymous current of travelers.
I sat there staring at her empty stool for way too long.
My flight got canceled an hour later. Typical. I ended up spending the night at the airport hotel, staring at the ceiling and thinking about her — about how two people could cross paths for a few hours and leave a dent like that.
The next morning, I walked past the same bar before boarding a rescheduled flight. Her napkin was still there — she’d doodled something in pen. It was a sketch of the bartender, kind of cartoonish but good. And below it, she’d written, “Everyone’s waiting for something.”
I took the napkin. Don’t ask me why.
It’s been six months. I’ve been to that airport three more times since then. I still check that bar every time, half-hoping she’ll walk in again, hoodie and all. But she never does.
Sometimes I scroll through photographers’ Instagrams, trying to find her face, her style, anything that feels like her work. I haven’t found it. Maybe I never will.
But sometimes, late at night, when I’m stuck on a design project and the screen starts to blur, I think about her sitting next to me, that brief connection that shouldn’t have mattered but somehow still does.
I guess that’s the thing about missed connections — they never really leave. They just stay in the background of your life, flickering like an airport light that never turns off.
