by Anne Gumiran

The plane shook as we were experiencing a patch of turbulence. I was on a tree [yoga] pose at the lavatory as I peed, and I thought: What the actual fuck? Is this some kind of a bucket list or something? I’ve been flying for years, but it’s the first time that something like this happened. At least, I made it through.

I know I was only distracting myself.

My anxiety was awfully high as hell. I braced my tense self from home all the way to the airport, as the navigating app shifted between a 6:14 to 6:16 a.m. ETA at the airport when my flight ticket said boarding was at 6:00 a.m.

My phone’s screen lit up with Franco’s message: “Flight 5J 880 Cotabato ON TIME, Not Yet Boarding.”

My brother sped through the expressway, relaxed, as he knew that his mentally unstable sister’s silence meant otherwise, and panicking will not do any good for her.

I received a message from Franco again saying, “Boarding na.”

And I was still a goddamn 15 minutes away.

Franco sent a series of “consoling” messages on our group chat about how the line may take some time and how the staff from the nearby boarding gate has been paging a family for 30 minutes already yet they still won’t close.

9 minutes…

I wore my backpack and hung my tote on my right shoulder. I became hardcore religious for five minutes straight as I prayed to God and mumbles my professor’s sign off message on his email, “Miracles do happen, if you believe.” I know, I know. I was desperate.

We approached the airport’s entrance at 6:13 a.m. I was so ready to blast the door open the moment we pulled over.

Yes, I made it.

It all happened dramatically — the way I imagined it to be, like a scene from a movie. Paul pulled over at the VIP and Airline crew’s gate, and I flew from the car to the entrance, threw my stuff to the scanner and blurted with my shaky voice, “Last call po!”

Swiftly, I grabbed my bags from the other end and went as if I was running for my life.

Franco’s message popped up again, “I talked to the ground staff and told them that you guys are in the airport already.”

I hurriedly showed my boarding pass and ID to the guard saying, “Last call po.” What else can I say? It was all that I had in mind at that time.

Again, everything happened in a blur as I almost flew past the check in counters, final scanner, and through the other boarding gates. I literally ran for two freaking minutes! No walk in the sunshine here, sir. Got no time to chill.

I saw Franco sitting alone like an angel at the boarding gate, with no lines and no other passengers at the waiting area. I was a bit relieved upon seeing the boarding gate 143b open with the ground staff still smiling.

But where’s Radd?

We got no updates.

“Ma’am and Sir, we’ll close the boarding gates at 6:30 a.m.”

Okay, what the hell? Radd sent a video of him in a long line to the airport’s gate. “RUN, TELL THEM YOU’VE BEEN PAGED, SAY THE MAGIC WORDS: LAST CALL,” we told him.

The ground staff members’ cheerful mood slowly faded away as they were just some 3 minutes away from closing the boarding gates. Radd was still not around.

2 minutes…

1 minute…

“Ma’am, please board already or the three of you will be offloaded. Please tell your friend to book the next flight instead.”

Franco and I exchanged worried glances.

We handed them our boarding passes and IDs and walked to the carousel, looking back.

We stayed for a minute or two at the carousel with high hopes of seeing Radd appearing at the boarding gate. Our wishful thinking plummeted when the carousel’s door closed, and we started moving toward the aircraft.

The next thing we knew, Radd was nowhere beside us to witness the majestic Taal volcano crater and all the other sites below us on an early morning flight to Cotabato.

As I sat there, eyes glued to the sea of clouds outside the window, I reckoned my takeaways from this morning’s action: Do not be comfortable with the thought that the airport is just an hour away from home.

It may not be cool to be paged for being late for a flight, but it’s quite a story (with a moral lesson) to tell my kid one day. It might have made me anxious but then I realized that I’ll never be 30 again or catching flights like that again. I may have been stressed that moment, but I know that when I look back on how I ran from the airport’s entrance to the boarding gates—now or in the next days, weeks, or years—speaking about it would only bring laughter. It would be one of those travel stories that we’d love to look back on and talk about during a trip or when we’re old and gray and could not run as fast as we did when we were called last for our flights.

I also thought: I could write a story with one hell of an adrenaline pump, no caffeine added, in one sitting on an hour-long plane ride.