He’s sitting nearby playing a game and he’s good at it. Move after move, with hardly a pause, the cards move off the deck and into arrangement, and he just doesn’t seem to miss. She certainly never sees him miss a move - that’s how fast he goes. He plays a deck with certainty, sweeps the cards up and shuffles, then plays another round. This is a formula, and he’s just executing again and again, without a sense of celebration upon a win or a tell that he’s lost. It’s math to him, and he’s as mechanical about it as if he, himself, were a math problem. Only one right answer, nothing personal.
She knows it’s not polite to watch, but from this angle he can’t see her, and his movements are hypnotic. While they wait for the next update on their delay, she watches as deck after deck goes down and comes back up. She wonders why. Is it as calming for him as it is for her, distracting him from the anxiety of missing his son’s graduation after so many years of struggle? Perhaps his life is pure chaos, and this precise order gives him that sense of control? Good grief, maybe he’s even a savant.
On and on it goes. She stops trying to spot his next move before he does and relaxes, no longer competing with him and just letting her eyes rest on the pattern, as though he were the driver and she could just watch the road. She trusts his vision, his reactions, and she allows her focus to loosen, her vision to soften. This is reassuring.
But then he stops.
She snaps back. She can see his next play, surely he isn’t stuck. But he’s just stopped. Finally he moves, but it’s only to lower his head, and then she can see him take a very long breath. Big, probably cleansing. She does the same, and it feels good. He doesn’t release the card he’s holding, but he rests his hand on the table.
She’s unreasonably puzzled by the change. There was no PA announcement, he didn’t reach for a phone. The rhythm of his cards felt like it could have gone on forever, so the fact that it’s stopped is jarring to her. What was the distraction?
Finally she notices the tear. He turns his head so that the light refracting through a tear at the corner of his cheek catches her attention, and she knows. It’s loss. He shakes his head almost imperceptibly, but now that she knows, she sees it. Something is gone forever, something precious, maybe even the thing he loved most. And now the flight is delayed, maybe just a commuter flight for him, but it’s one more thing in a world where the only thing that matters doesn’t exist anymore.
So he’s playing a game to keep his mind busy, but sometimes it still catches up to him. She wishes she could hug him and tell him that someday it won’t hurt in the same way, but he’s a stranger, so she looks away. She picks up her bag and wanders away to another seat. She shouldn’t be watching him anyway.
