The Girl Who Mistook the Airport for a Church
She didn’t go there to fly.
She went there to forgive, to remember,
and maybe, to be remembered.
Until the airport spoke back
and the waiting turned into something else.

June never really knew what to do with Sundays after he left.

The first few weeks, she tried church again. Sat through hymns that used to make sense. But they didn’t hold her anymore.
So she started going to the airport instead.

It wasn’t planned.
It just… happened.
She had gone once to pick up a friend and stayed hours longer than she needed to.
There was something about the arrivals gate. The way people ran into arms, the way names echoed from speakers it felt like a place where something might still happen.

That’s how it began.
Every Sunday afternoon, June would take the train to Terminal 2.
She didn’t dress in white. Sometimes she wore old jeans, sometimes a sweater that still smelled like him.
She sat near Gate 13 with a coffee and a notebook she rarely wrote in.

It had been seven years since her fiancé boarded a flight to Reykjavik and never came back.

He was supposed to spend three months in Iceland on a photography grant. He sent her a voice note the night before he left. Said, “I’ll bring back something better than a souvenir.”

She never heard from him again.

The airline confirmed he landed.
The Icelandic consulate promised to investigate.
His social media stayed quiet.
His bank accounts stopped moving.
And the world did what it always does with missing people:
It moved on.

But June didn’t.
She wasn’t in denial. She was just… unfinished.

There was no funeral.
No last words.
No proof of goodbye.

And so she waited.
Not in desperation just in discipline.
A quiet protest against the idea that time should heal what it never explained.

The airport staff grew used to her.
The barista at Gate 13 stopped asking her name.
She always ordered the same drink, sat at the same seat, watched the same screen.

Nobody questioned it.
After a while, people stop noticing grief.
Especially the kind that behaves itself.

Then one Sunday, it happened.

She was mid-sip when the airport intercom crackled:

“Gate 13… He’s ready now.”

She froze. Looked up.
No one else reacted.
She shook it off.

Then came again clearer, louder:

“June… He’s ready now.”

This time, the woman next to her looked up too.
Their eyes met. The woman blinked, then turned away.

But June stood.
Walked slowly toward the gate.
Her coffee was still warm in her hand. She placed it down without drinking the rest.

The automatic doors opened as if expecting her.

Beyond them, there was no plane.
Just a hallway.
A kind of hush filled it. Like the sound after something huge leaves the sky.

She walked until she saw it.
A single mirror, resting in the middle of the terminal.
Framed in silver.
Untouched by time or hands.

Across it, scrawled in red:

“You waited.
Now fly.”

No one saw her leave.
No camera captured her face.
Only her shoes, left neatly beside the gate.

A month later, a video appeared online.
A woman barefoot, spinning slowly on a glacier.
Wearing a soft grey sweater, the sleeves too long.

No voice. No caption.

Until someone reposted it with these words:

“I didn’t follow love.
I followed silence
and it led me home.”

Some people say she went mad.
Others say she finally found him.

But those who really understand
they say she didn’t leave to be found.
She left because sometimes, when the world refuses to answer,
you go looking for a place
where the questions don’t echo back.

Maybe that’s what travel really is.
Not to escape.
Not even to discover.
But to enter the one place left untouched by closure
and build a home inside the waiting.