Agreeing to meet a stranger off the internet at 1am in another country is a ludicrous thing to do.
But yet here I am.
My flight lands at Landvetter airport two hours later than scheduled and I disembark the aircraft, still wobbling, but now also moist at the elbows and prickly with panic. Both my pinkie toes are struck numb from high anxiety. I am late. How rude, how inconsiderate. Ludicrous.
And what if…? What if this was all some elaborate prank; executed by some old schoolmate bearing a grudge and with a sneering knack for revenge served at its very coldist. What if there was no stranger off the internet? Or what if there was a stranger but the dangerous sort? Those thoughts had not left me.
That is, until I stepped in off the tarmac and out into the fluorescent light of the arrivals hall.
A blonde woman, more spectacles and kindness than face, was hopping there holding a homemade sign with my name on it.
I’d always wanted to be met at an airport by a person holding a homemade sign with my name on it and so here it was, happening. Art, Actually.
Victoria greeted me with the affection a dear friend might after years spent apart being successful. Or years spent apart being tragically alone and lost.
‘You are real!’, she chirped.
Carrie Not the Kind of Girl You'd Marry 