Fernanda Track

Fabian stood near the dull silver of Gate G3, where the metal benches gleamed faintly under Schiphol's artificial lights. Too polished to feel welcoming, too tired to pretend otherwise. The floor beneath him was laid in the kind of square grey tiles that always felt like an afterthought, as if designed more for surveillance than comfort. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Not anxious. Just... displaced.

Behind the wide, cold pane of glass, a sunset spilled itself slowly across the tarmac. Not the usual diluted dusk Amsterdam offered, but something rarer. Deep, unfiltered orange, low and molten, like the sky was trying to remember how to be tender. It didn't burn. It warmed. Reached through glass and fatigue to rest lightly against his chest. He inhaled without thinking. Let it touch something in him that had been cold for months.

Cairo. One hour.

His body didn't move, but something in him leaned forward. Not with urgency. With longing.

He pulled his phone from the coat pocket where it lived like a secret and slid it out of airplane mode. A moment's breath passed. Then, the cascade. Five new messages from his mother, stacked like blades. Passive-aggressive time stamps. Disguised concern honed into critique. A line-by-line itinerary correction for a life she didn't inhabit but still insisted on curating.

He didn't read them twice. Didn't reply. Just thumbed the airplane mode back on. Let the silence return. The only kind of boundary she'd ever obeyed.

He sat. Back straight. Hands loose in his lap. Thought of Fernanda. Not in the way people say they remember someone. Not with reverence or narrative. He thought of her in the real way, the way grief presses images into you like wet ink through cotton.

Fernanda, who had loved thunderstorms and hated mornings.

Fernanda, who had once gone three weeks without speaking and still left voicemails.

Fernanda, who had spiraled so quietly it took months to realize she was gone before she was gone.

Her body had been found in a hostel bathroom in Porto. Pills. Cold tile. The kind of ending everyone thinks they saw coming but no one ever stops.

Fabian didn't cry. Not here. Not in this nowhere-space built for transient bodies and overpriced bottled water. But he did tilt his head slightly toward the glass.

To the sky.

Not upward, not desperate. Just... inclined.

And he wondered, softly, without believing, but still wondering, if once he was up there, suspended between continents, maybe Fernanda would be there too.

Not as ghost. Not as angel.

Just as presence.

A hum beneath the engines. A stillness between clouds. A memory made altitude.

The loudspeaker broke the moment without apology.

A woman's voice, too warm to be sincere: "Due to severe weather patterns over Icelandic airspace, several departures have been delayed or canceled."

Fabian didn't pay attention. Not his flight. Not his worry. He knew, deep in that private place where intuition lives like a curled animal, that his plane would rise. That he would be in Egypt by morning. That whatever was unraveling inside him had a destination.

He folded his hands. Waited. Let the sun stain his skin orange through the glass.

The gate remained the same. Dull metal. Tired tile.

But inside him, something had already lifted.