Chapter Thirty-Five

Maeve

When you do as much flying as I do, you see all sorts. You see parents wrangling toddlers who refuse to sleep or sit still. You see loved-up couples on their honeymoon taking selfies every five minutes. You see crumpled and disgruntled professionals who have no time for either of the above. You also see people crying.

Once I was flying back from Dubai and there was a middle-aged woman in floods of tears in Premium Economy. I was sitting across the aisle from her and watched her sob silently the entire flight while squeezing hold of a grey sweatshirt so tight her knuckles were white. I asked her if she was okay before we'd taken off and she said yes with what could only be described as a brave smile. I asked her again when she refused food and drinks, and I told her they had snacks in the galley if she was hungry later. Her smile was just as brave but it was also tainted with overwhelming exhaustion and a trace of frustration. I knew then that she wanted to be left alone to cry in peace.

When we landed in Dublin, she was approached to leave the plane first and she got up with some help from a member of the cabin crew.

As I disembarked ten minutes or so later, I looked back at the plane and saw something that took my next breath away. A wooden coffin was being slid out of the bowels of the plane. And the sobbing woman was on the tarmac, watching it with the grey sweatshirt still in her arms.

I've never forgotten that woman and I always look out for crying passengers on planes and in airport terminals now, because not everybody is going on the holiday of a lifetime, or being forced to do a business trip they're far too busy and important to make. Some people are making life-altering journeys they'd never conceived of embarking on. Some people are flying into a whole new world of pain and loss and grief.

Maybe that's why I refuse to cry as I pack my suitcase in my hotel room. Maybe that's why I successfully hold back the tears in the taxi to the airport and in the queues I stand in for check-in and security. Maybe that's why I pinch the skin on my wrist between my pointed nails as I sit on the plane and wait for it to fill with other passengers, because that small sharp pain is easier to focus on than the heavy ache in my chest that keeps on threatening to fill my throat and burst out as tears.

Because I don't deserve to cry.

I've not lost anything.

I'm just saying goodbye to a new friend.

I should feel elated, hopeful, joyful that I had experiences with them that I never imagined possible.

I should feel grateful that I've been given a glimpse of what a future could look like with a partner who loves me as I am, without wanting to change me, without feeling like something is missing.

But I am finding all of those feelings are drowned by an overwhelming sense of loss. That I've lost Loncey, even though I never really had them.

And now I'm crying on a plane, despite my best efforts, despite making moon-shaped indents in my skin. I'm crying as I stare out of the window at the nearby lights of Las Vegas and realise how, when the tears start to blur my vision, they look like the night sky full of stars, just like the ones Loncey loves to paint.