#a bit earlier than our usual early snowfall... usually the earliest it snows is on halloween night

[ahaura]

it's snowing 🥰

[yarn-bard]

Snowed In

It was 11 A.M. on a snowy Christmas morning, and it was one of the worst days of my entire life. I sat in a quiet corner and cried as I watched the snow gently fall. “Flight 235 is now boarding rows 1-10,” the voice on the intercom said. Some people moved behind me, dragging luggage after them, and I tried to muffle my sniffling.

It was 11 A.M. on a snowy Christmas morning, and I was stuck at an airport. Separated from my family by a full three-hour flight that wouldn’t depart until early tomorrow.

I tried to read the book I’d brought, but I couldn’t stay focused, and every time my attention started to drift, I’d just start crying again. The woman at the nearest service desk looked at me with sympathy each time I swung by to grab another tissue. She has a hard job, I thought, noticing that I was far from the only person crying in this airport at this particular time.

After an hour or so, the woman at the service desk left. She returned with a large bowl of sweets, which she offered to everyone on my delayed flight. I took a butterscotch hard candy, and she scooped out a whole handful of them and deposited them onto the table beside me, insisting that I take them.

I think the woman’s shift ended after that, because another woman had taken her place at the desk, and I didn’t see her again. At least someone here got to go home for Christmas, I thought.

Time passed. The tears stopped coming; maybe I exhausted myself.

At some point, I tried to take a nap. Just curled up in one of the uncomfortable seats and closed my eyes. But it was almost impossible to find a comfortable position to sleep in, and I was already dreading having to spend the whole night here. Not to mention the fact that I was nervous about my stuff getting stolen even if I did somehow manage to fall asleep.

They ordered everyone on my flight pizza for lunch. It tasted mediocre, but I was hungry and miserable enough that I didn’t care. I thought maybe I’d buy myself a nicer dinner at an airport restaurant. Somehow, I didn’t think the airplane employees felt sorry enough to give us a free Christmas dinner.

More time passed. I wandered around the airport for a while until my shoulder got sore from lugging around my bag. I went online and saw all of my friends talking about Christmas, and that got me crying again.

There was a short line at the restaurant I picked for dinner. I recognized the woman who stood in front of me as another passenger from the same delayed flight. She smiled at me, though I could see by her smudged eyeliner that she’d been crying, too. I’d removed my own makeup hours earlier, tired of having to reapply it over and over again.

“Where are you headed?” I asked her.

“Seattle,” she said. “How about you?”

“Portland,” I said. “Though I think we’re going to be on the same Seattle flight.” It was the earliest flight that still had open seats.

“Table for two?” The waiter asked us. I hadn’t realized we’d moved up so far in line.

Me and the girl exchanged a look.

“Sure,” I said. “Sounds good,” the girl agreed.

I guess neither of us wanted to eat alone on Christmas.

I’m normally kind of awkward and shy around strangers, but for whatever reason, I didn’t have any trouble talking to this woman. Her name was Olivia, she had shoulder-length dark hair and eyes, and it turned out we had a lot in common. We went to the same school, liked a lot of the same television shows (and disliked the same sports), and had both grown up on the rainy side of the Pacific Northwest.

By the end of dinner, we were laughing and giggling together, and it was honestly a better time than I’d had on most of the dates I had been on in my brief stint of adulthood.

We hung around each other after dinner, too, glad for some companionship.

I got out my deck of tarot cards just to shuffle it around in my hands a little, give me something to do. Olivia watched with interest. “You do tarot?” she said, her eyes wide.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes, I make a couple bucks doing readings for people at the airport. If you want, I’ll do you for free, though.” I smiled.

“Okay,” Olivia said.

We settled down on the floor. I handed her the cards to shuffle, and she did so with a delicate ease, like she was handling something precious.

“Do you have anything in mind you want to ask, or do you just want a general reading?” I asked.

She stared down at the cards, lost in contemplation for a long moment. “Just a general reading,” she decided.

I drew three cards. One of the most basic spreads: a card for the past, a card for the present, and one for the future.

Olivia giggled when the second card I turned up was The Lovers, with all of its nudity and sexual implications. I blushed, not usually this easily embarrassed over something so silly. “This is a card about choice,” I explained. “Free will and all of that. Though it can also mean love.”

“Maybe it’s about choosing love,” Olivia said softly. “Or just having the freedom to love.” She looked up at me, and my breath caught, though I did not know why.

I directed my gaze back to the cards. “It’s a bit rare to get three major arcana like this. It means that there are a lot of bigger forces at work in your life right now, things that you don’t have as much control over.” I said. In order, I had drawn The Tower, The Lovers, and then The Star.

“Bit ironic to get The Star on Christmas, isn’t it?” Olivia asked. “With the whole star leading everyone to Jesus’ birth and all.”

I smiled. “Yeah,” I said. “The Star is… hope, I guess. It’s a hopeful card, but also kind of a sad one. Because you’re chasing after something that you can’t have. It’s up in the sky, out of reach.”

I’ve done enough readings for people that I can always tell when I say something that cuts to the bone for the querent. And what I just said cut right through to Olivia’s marrow. She flinched back, her physical recoil almost imperceptible, yet unmistakable.

I switched my focus to a different card, trying to give her a little space. “And The Tower is, well…” I started.

“You tried to get too close to God and God struck you down,” Olivia said. “Babel. Cataclysm.” She spoke from old wounds.

“You’ve got a great intuition for this,” I said. My smile was a bit rueful, now.

Olivia shrugged. “You just drew the right cards,” she said. “Thank you, though.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, gathering up my cards. “Sometimes tarot has only hard truths for us.”

Around 11 P.M.—which marked over twelve hours we’d spent in this airport—Olivia and I overheard a man at the service desk telling another traveler that the airport had set out blankets and sleeping mats for the unfortunate souls who were trapped here overnight.

I claimed my sleeping mat and blanket with relief, glad I didn’t have to attempt to sleep in the uncomfortable airport seats.

Then Olivia and I located our flight’s gate, unfolded our mats right next to each other, and settled in for the night. It felt almost like a sleepover, two girls curling up next to each other, close enough to whisper secrets. Only, Olivia was staring at me in a way that no girl had ever stared at me before, and my heart was pounding in my chest, and I couldn’t identify the feeling that stretched tight in my heart.

Olivia moved closer. I closed my eyes and leaned in.

It was nearly midnight on a snowy Christmas night, and I was kissing another girl for the first time in my life. It was a good kiss; a little sweet, a little intense. A little happy and a little sad, maybe.

Afterward, I stroked her hair and watched the snowfall outside the airport window. “I think I’m going to choose to focus on the hope part,” Olivia whispered.

We held each other all through the night, tangled up under both of our blankets. Tomorrow, we would get on our flight, and after that, we would maybe never see each other again.

I watched the last couple minutes of Christmas tick away into the clouded, starless night, and for the first time that day, I wished that this moment would never end.