It was Lana’s twenty-eighth birthday, and she was bloated and bored at the airport lounge in Brussels. Her coworkers were giggling and hunching over Ana, the cabin manager’s phone. She watched the Brussels Airlines and LOT airplanes take off. The flight she was supposed to work on was delayed.

Beside her, a little girl with pigtails spoke to her father in Croatian. The girl was pointing to the airplanes; the dad was nodding, scrolling through his phone, not listening. Lana turned up the music in her earphones, too tired to think about her grief. Young girls with their fathers especially made her emotional.

She’d declared to her mother, at the age of nineteen, that she wanted to see the entire world in order to escape her all-encompassing thoughts of death. She didn’t say the latter part out loud. And there Lana was, seeing it; it was mostly just connections and delays. Missed connections, long, unpaid delays. That was the whole world for her, a flight attendant for Air Serbia flights.

Slumped far into her seat, Lana alternated between scrolling through Instagram and Tinder. She put on a trashy gossip podcast, but the host’s voice irritated her.

“We’re going to get currywurst and coffee, want some?” Ana asked.

Lana looked up from her phone and shook her head. She was running low on money but lied that she wasn’t hungry. Ana shrugged and walked away with indifference.

 

* * *

Only one hour had gone by, and she found she could no longer stand the thought of waiting another eight hours: sober, over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived, and surrounded by grumpy coworkers and furious flyers.

On her phone’s job applications app, she searched for other postings, but she thought it was all the same. Really, she couldn’t yet part with Germany because Johan was there. The last time they were together, a week before they broke up, Lana and Johan went dancing with his friends in Cologne.

One of the friends insisted they drink absinthe—lots of it—which they did. At four in the morning, hours before she was to report back to the airport, Johan, with his sunken eyes and veiny temples, looked at her, naked in his bed, her tattoos on display in the soft morning light.

“I am so in love with you, oh my God. But wait,” he began to snicker. Lana shifted toward him, also laughing, coming down from her languid drunkenness.

“What?” she giggled.

“What’s your dad’s name? I don’t even know these simple things,” he laughed. She felt a metallic taste in her mouth—it was disgust, fear. If she wasn’t so tired and half-drunk, she would’ve shut herself up and turned to stone, but instead, her eyes filled with sad wells of water.

“Well, my dad is dead,” she said. She was staring at the ceiling, disturbed by the whole scene. He lay beside her, pressing his hand on her warm cheek.

“Oh, baby, I didn’t know,” he said. She wiped a tear away and tried to suppress her father’s face from her mind.

“What happened?” he asked.

She thought of making something up. Something normal—cancer, heart attack, stroke. She couldn’t come up with anything on such little notice.

“Before I was born, like two years before, I had a sister—this was back when my parents lived in Yugoslavia,” she began. He stroked her stomach while she talked, occasionally raising his hand to wipe her tears away. “My dad was supposed to watch her one afternoon. She was always swimming on the beach—they lived by the Adriatic. Well, he looked away for a few minutes, and she drowned.”

“Oh, Lana,” said Johan, also drunk but serious. Lana sighed and squinted her eyes, still afraid to look at her lover. “He was never the same, apparently. I mean, my mother forgave him. They moved to Belgium, they had me and my brother. But he was a wreck,” she said.

“Of course,” Johan said.

She took a breath and let her voice shake—it was very difficult for her to speak. “He killed himself on what would’ve been my sister’s birthday, last year.”

“Lana,” he said. There was not much more that he could say. It was not the type of story one ought to tell drunk, after a careless night of sex, laughter, and clubbing.

“Why do you hold all of this in?” he asked.

“Stop it,” she snarled. “I don’t need your pity now. Don’t treat me any differently, please. I only told you this because it feels strange not to tell you.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything. Oh, Lana, let’s sleep now; that will make you feel better. You have work,” he said. He was very German. She didn’t sleep.

 

* * *

Back at the gate, the girls ate currywurst and an assortment of savoury pastries. Lana got hungry watching them eat and bought a protein bar and yogurt at the nearby store for eight euros. She was worried about money but thought of getting a beverage too, because small purchases were her only sources of happiness.

In the refrigerator section, a neat assortment of beverages lined the shelf. She nearly choked, because there it was, her violent reminder of Johan: a plastic bottle of crisp, urine-coloured apfelschorle. His favourite drink, one she could never find in Belgium. He was haunting her.

 

* * *

She ended things with him coldly. It was too much for her—letting someone love her, having him so much as attempt to climb the steep hills that held her torments.

“I can’t do this distance,” she said over the phone, back in her hometown, Toronto. They both cried a lot. Before he hung up, he slightly raised his voice.

“You aren’t who you say you are. You’re not as detached as you think—you’re an actress, you hide all of your pain and insecurities,” he said. She didn’t say anything. “You love me, I know it,” he said.

No man except for him had caught on to her performance; she really did love him. One time, while they ate breakfast in his Dresden flat, their elbows pressed together against the gingham tablecloth, he examined her while she scooped dollops of jam onto her toast.

“Do you feel like you’re always watching what you say around me?”

Lana dropped her spoon down, the sound startling both of them. “What do you mean?” she asked. He finished chewing and rubbed her leg. “Like you don’t tell me anything and you just pretend that everything’s fine, that we’re fun and casual. But I heard you crying last night, when you thought I was asleep. I don’t want us to be casual.”

Lana stopped eating and looked out his kitchen window, which faced a main road. She watched the cars drive by and thought of how she could’ve been honest and told him about how she saw a man who looked like her father on the S-Bahn. But instead, she said, “I’m myself. I’m eating with you, and I like it. I don’t think I’m performing or lying.” He didn’t believe it.

“You can tell me anything, Lana,” he said. She felt unbearably guilty for withholding herself. But still, she did nothing to ease this guilt and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I like this jam, though.”

This had been before she told him about her family. The tragedy made her deceitful.

She ate the protein bar quickly, and the strawberry yogurt too, facing the large window, her back turned away from her coworkers. Her phone screen showed the time, plainly. It was 11:20 am—she had seven hours until boarding. Notifications popped up on her screen; a man from Tinder asked to meet up, and some people were liking her post on Instagram. The photo was some stupid, meaningless one—she only posted it out of habit.

The smoking area was outside. A group of young-looking Slavs were smoking and vaping, laughing and sharing jokes in Ukrainian or Polish. Lana lit a Swiss cigarette and watched them absently.

In the fluorescent-lit bathroom, she squatted over the toilet and tried to defecate. Nothing came out. She was wet—cold beads of sweat dropped down her back as she groaned in pain.

“Fuck!” she yelled. It was almost funny to her, that even her bowels refused to submit.

At the concession store, she bought that same bottle of apfelschorle she saw earlier, and a package of marzipan chocolates shaped like cat’s tongues. She felt the heaviness of December weigh on her while she ate the tongue-shaped chocolates on the moving walkway, back to her original terminal.

The flight attendants were all away from the gate, except for Angie, the Dutch girl who sold her underwear online. Lana waved to her and looked back down towards her phone. She told herself she’d simply have to sleep with another man to get over Johan, so she messaged the Tinder man; she suggested they meet at midnight.

She thought back to what Johan said about infidelity. He told her, “If you touch another penis, I’ll never speak to you again.” Lana secretly liked his jealousy, but she pretended to get offended, like modern girls would.

Angie cleared her throat and looked up from her own phone. “What’s up with you? You seem upset.”

“It’s just this guy,” Lana said, without thinking.

“What should we do in Amsterdam?”

“I’ll visit my family and then I’ll get really drunk to tolerate them. You?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lana groaned. “I’ll eat pastries and check the Christmas market, see some cute kids.”

“I don’t care for Christmas markets, and kids give me anxiety,” Angie said. Lana didn’t say anything.

“You know, I actually manifested my boyfriend. The trick is, you have to send a message to his mind, like a wire transfer. It’s called the Nikola Tesla method,” Angie went on.

Lana wanted to laugh, but didn’t, because Angie’s voice, brilliant and sultry, captivated her. She leaned in and asked how.

“Well, you need to figure out what you want to say to him,” Angie said.

Lana furrowed her eyebrows. She found it profound, albeit idiotic—this notion of mind control.

“Do you like tarot? I can give you a reading—it really clears the mind,” Angie said.

“No, no, it’s okay. I’m just tired,” Lana said. But then she considered the offer and straightened up out of her slouched position. “I don’t know, my grandmother reads my coffee cup sometimes. Last year, she said I’d meet my husband soon, but I never did.”

“Tarot is more accurate,” Angie said. “My dream is to open up a tarot clinic, you know, I have a gift for these things. I’m also a medium—”

Lana’s phone rang. She got up to answer it and mouthed an excuse to Angie.

“Happy birthday, Lana!” her brother’s voice beamed.

Lana felt guilty about hating this. She didn’t want to acknowledge it at all—why did her brother have to bring it up? She cleared her throat anyway and played along. “Oh, thanks,” she said. “You’re up early. Is it the baby?”

“Yes, the baby. Where are you now?”

“Frankfurt. There’s a delay, so I’m stuck here.”

She felt her eyes fill with dreadful, uncontrollable tears, and her throat closed off with that awful lump that made it impossible to talk. She cried silently, while her brother spoke and the baby made noises in the background of the call.

“I can’t hear you, bad signal,” her brother said. Before she could answer, he hung up.

She let herself continue to cry, still silently, and walked towards the perfume section of the duty-free shop near their gate. Three more hours, she thought dully.

While she stared at the perfumes in the duty-free shop, a memory popped into her head. Last year, Johan took her to the Dresden Christmas Market for her birthday. No matter how hard she tried to bury the memories of him, they seemed to constantly erupt, particularly during agonizingly mundane moments.

They ate sausages and flaky pastries. He had crumbs in his beard, but she didn’t tell him. She looked at him with happy, drunk eyes, a faraway grin.

“This is one of the best birthdays I’ve had, in so long.”

After a lot of wine, in that same dimly lit bar, she imagined a conversation with him. “My father’s death was very difficult for me. I felt I could never understand him, how deep his pain went.”

It would’ve been so simple, yet it didn’t happen. It was a fantasy, removed from reality—in reality, they moved on to discuss less serious things.

After the phone call with her brother, she stared at her phone and swallowed more of her beverage. She wished it was spiked with vodka. She couldn’t take it anymore; she messaged Johan.

“I miss you.”

Her heart was pounding through her chest as she walked towards the gate. Angie and some of the other girls hovered around her in the lounge, because they overheard that it was her birthday. They were making plans for festivities. Lana was fine with the attention—anything that distracted her from thinking about what she just sent was good.

Another hour passed by. More apfelschorle and marzipan were consumed. When she checked her phone again, she saw birthday messages from people she hardly spoke to, hardly even remembered. None of the wishes came from him.

It was time for boarding. The passengers lined up frantically, pushing and shoving each other. She mindlessly scanned everyone’s boarding passes from their phones. Her own phone buzzed and blinked in her pocket, but she couldn’t check until later.

When she turned her phone on after the descent, she saw that her mother had sent her a funny video of their weiner dog Pepe accompanied by a birthday message. Halfway through reading it, a notification popped up: Johan had called. A smile overtook her as she quickly connected to the airport Wi-Fi. She messaged him again:

sorry, I was on airplane mode.

In the line for customs, a few tears fell down her cheek. She didn’t bother to wipe them away as the people in front of her moved up. Her heart was sinking. He was typing and erasing, while she was nervously fidgeting with her passport.

Lana got through customs, and the three dots in the message bar kept appearing and disappearing in their cruel ways. She put the phone away; she’d wait for him. She was always waiting. That was all she could do. He was now in control—a puppet master, and she, a marionette. For the first time in her life, Lana wanted him to have it.

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