When the plane landed in Charles de Gaulle it was almost midnight. The metro in Paris closes around this time. By the time I got my luggage and walked past the million hallways leading to the gates, the place was dead, the night was dark and icy cold, like December nights usually are. I was meeting my dad and he wasn’t where we had agreed to meet anymore, probably because my flight was three hours late and he was wondering around looking for me. So I tried contacting him and the hotel where the rest of us were and nothing, no luck. I was all alone in an empty airport with some weird people walking around and with no contact. If there was a right time to freak out it would be it.
So I put myself together and went to look for my dad that had to be somewhere at that airport. I noticed a guy about my age sleeping over his backpack on the floor and I passed him a couple times coming and going with no luck finding anyone or any help. Around 3am I had to stop because I was so tired. That’s when I found a phone in the information booth and called my mom in the hotel to let her know I was alright, after that I just sat down and hoped that my dad was ok and just lost as I was as well.
So as I sat hopeless staring at the floor, the sleeping-on-his-backpack guy came and sat beside me, he saw a Canadian flag on my backpack and started to speak English to me. He told me his story, that a friend had stood him up for New Year’s Eve, that he flew from the States to meet him and he never showed up, that he had no money and no place to sleep because his credit card got stuck into an ATM machine. So there we were, two strangers from two completely different parts of the world that, should these events hadn’t happened to us, would probably just had walked past each other.
He was my angel that night, he distracted me, made jokes when I was getting nervous about not knowing where in the world my dad was, we took turns sleeping, shared some chocolate and morning finally came and we took a cab to my hotel. We helped each other and spent the New Year’s together. My dad was also in the airport but in other terminal. But the thing is, I was not alone, I am never alone, somehow there’s always someone there in the most unexpected ways to pick me up, to talk me through the night, to kiss me better, coincidence? I think not.
It all depends what you believe in, maybe you think we were in the right place at the right time and that it was a pure coincidence that I couldn’t find my dad and that the ATM machine was broken, well as for me I believe that people get in your life in the exact time they’re supposed to and when you most need them to and there’s a reason for everything, for every leaf that falls down from a tree there’s a reason.
We keep trying to change life and what happens, we want things to have happened before, already or maybe later. We're never satisfied with now, I’ve been trying hard to change this in me, to live the moment and savour whatever it is that I am doing wherever I am doing it and whoever I am doing it with because life is short and we will miss this very moment in a little while.
