Lost and Found

Five minutes before boarding, I made my usual trip to the ladies' washroom. I'm one of those travellers who avoids taking a bio break 45,000 feet above the ground.

As I started walking, a little boy bumped into me, crying uncontrollably. I bent down and asked him what was wrong.

"I can't find my family," he managed between tears.

I immediately called over an airline staff member. She was wonderful- calm, reassuring, asking him gentle questions while I tried to comfort him. Another member of the ground staff joined us.

His words stayed with me. "Don't worry," he told the little boy. "The airport isn't so big that we can't find them." For a moment, the child stopped crying. Then he suddenly remembered.

"I know my granny's phone number."

The airline staff handed him a phone and asked him to dial it. Halfway through punching in the digits, he looked up, dropped the phone, and ran.

All three of us instinctively followed. A few seconds later, he had found his family.They looked surprised by the intensity of his reaction. But his fear had been real. To him, those few minutes must have felt like an eternity. I smiled, pretended to scold the family after giving them a wink, and quietly walked away, relieved that the story had ended well.

By evening, I counted it as my good deed for the day. But the little boy stayed with me. Not because he got lost—but because of what being lost meant to him.

It made me wonder: when I was his age, would I have reacted the same way? I honestly don't remember ever being terrified of being separated from the people I loved. Then I realised something. I was carrying a different fear.

I had already experienced permanent loss. Losing a parent changes the way you understand absence. Perhaps once you've lived through a goodbye that can never be reversed, the fear of someone simply going away doesn't occupy the same space anymore.

I don't know whether that's a gift or a wound. Maybe it's both. The little boy's burden was the fear of being left behind. Mine was learning, far too early, that some people don't come back.

It reminded me that every person we meet is carrying an invisible story. Different fears. Different griefs. Different scars. These are the cards life deals us.

And while people can comfort us, as those strangers comforted that little boy, there are some burdens no one can carry for us.

They can only walk beside us until we find our way home.