The Pyle Inside

Once upon a time my family and I were in an airport returning home from a wonderful trip in Jamaica. We had left the resort later than we initially planned, which caused us to frantically rush through the airport to catch our return flight home. Unfortunately, we encountered long lines and frustration everywhere we went starting with the check-in desk where after 30 minutes of waiting the airport workers relieved us from our heavy bulky bags. After that we had to endure another 30 minutes of impatiently waiting in a security line that wrapped around the hall. We found that we had only about 10 minutes to get from security to our gate to catch our flight. As a result, we sprinted across the airport with our carry- on bags and finally made it to the gate. I was stressed that we would miss our flight, but ironically discovered that we had done all that rushing to just sit and wait.

After impatiently waiting, we checked the flight board to see what was taking the flight so long. My heart sunk. It turned out we had an eight-hour delay! “What the heck!” my brother exclaimed. Everybody was outraged. We just wanted to go home. How am I going to survive the next eight dreadful hours in a boring airport? I thought to myself. After a few minutes of shock, my Dad found us a place to sit and hunker down for the next eight hours. We were right in front of the fogged up windows looking out at the planes. I smelt the fresh bagels from the breakfast stand behind us.

“Does anyone else want a bagel?” my Dad asked.

“Yes please” I responded. Then my dad went off to get breakfast. After what seemed to be an eternity, he returned.

“Alright here you go” he said as he distributed the bagels. I immediately chowed down on my bagel. As I ate, I felt the dry bagel crumble in my mouth.

After I finished my bagel, I heard a whimper. I looked over and saw a little girl screaming and crying. Her mother hastefully picked her up and carried her away.

“Hey, what are you looking at?” I heard. I looked over and it was a boy who was a few years older than me sitting in the seat across from me. He got up and came over to me.

“I don’t know. What are you looking at?” I responded.

“He likes your shirt,” my Dad said to him, sitting at the other end of the seats.

 “Oh, thanks” the kid responded. “My name is Danaili, what’s yours?” he asked.

“John,” I responded. After that he pulled out his PlayStation portable and showed me a superhero fighting game. The premise of the game was to pick two heroes and try to defeat your opponent in an intense battle. We played the game for over two hours before I pulled out a portable movie device and we started watching movies. After we watched two movies we decided to take an adventure through the airport.  As I stood up, I felt the blood rush down to my stiff legs. After we recovered from the stiffness, my brother took us down to look in the overpriced gift shops. Roughly forty-five minutes passed before we started to walk back. When we returned, we just sat back and snacked on the fast food items that we had purchased. 

Eventually, we heard the intercom announce, “flight to Dallas airport in Virginia is now boarding.” Everybody was relieved and Danali and I were jumping for joy, but were also sad knowing that our time together was over.  We packed up our gaming devices and were ready to go. When we boarded the plane, I found that my seat was located in the front of the plane with my sister and that Danali’s seat was in the back of the plane with his grandmother.  After we settled into our seats, I fell into a deep sleep. A long day had come to an end and I was totally exhausted.  I felt a hand shake me awake, it was my sister. She joyfully announced that we had arrived at our destination. We gathered our belongings and met up with our family outside the plane.

As we walked out of the airport, I saw Danali running to catch his connecting flight to go home to New York. I waved to him and he waved back as we went our separate ways. At that moment, I realized that I would never see him again. He was a fun, spunky kid who was able to make an eight-hour airport delay waiting for our flight feel more like minutes. My dad apologized to the family for the long delay in getting home. I told my dad that I was glad that we got delayed because I would have never met Danali if the flight had been on time. I was thankful that I got the opportunity to meet Danali and strike up a quick friendship. Ever since then I have always looked at the bigger picture in seemingly bad situations.