Italy

Italy 2014.

“Flight 714 to London, Heathrow International Airport is now boarding.”

The loud speaker screamed at me through Mayday Parade’s “Happy Ending are Stories That Haven’t Ended Yet” chorus. This is the exact moment that I felt my heart beat in an irregularly, fast pattern that caught me off guard. Pausing the ballad in mid guitar solo, I collected my two bags, and took a deep breath for good luck. Breathing, I find aids me in most of the unsure occasions that I find myself in. So I just went with breathing. When in doubt breath I guess? When in doubt if you’re going to kill your ‘never been on an airplane-at the brink of combusting due to anxiety-naturally high-strung’ best friend Michael, who had not stopped fidgeting in his chair for the past 47 minutes. So yeah, I dealt with that by breathing.

Walking over to the line that had multiple kids my own age fidgeting much like my pal Michael, older people conversing with other older people, moms and dads hand in hand with children, and random people who were giving off the vibe of being pros at waiting in lines with fidgety people in it. Behind me were my two best friends. High-strung BIlly and ever so calm Hannah. Billy forgot about all of the thoughts that as his telepathic best friend I knew were running through his head and introduced himself to the petite, dark haired girl that was standing behind him. Hannah and I extended our hands to ‘small brown haired girl’. She told us her name was Claire and that she was also traveling to Italy to study abroad. I then noticed that the kids that appeared to be close in age to the three of us also had small green tags attached to their carry on luggage like we did. This people quickly registered to me as students that were in our study abroad group. For some strange reason, this made my already beating heart knock a little harder.

I handed my passport and my boarding pass to a man whose name tag read “Harry” and he told me to have a safe flight is an accent...