I missed the flight the way you miss a step in the dark—one wrong turn, a little hubris, and suddenly you’re falling. My ticket said Terminal B; I ended up at D, crying over a stale pack of almonds and arguing with a vending machine like it was fate’s receptionist. I was headed to Phoenix for a job interview I didn’t even want. Underpaid, overworked, newly single, and living in a studio with a ceiling that wept when it rained—of course the plane left without me.
I sank into a plastic chair and tried not to make the kind of noise that gets you a brochure for airport chapels. That’s when he sat down—mid-forties maybe, salt-and-pepper hair, boots that had touched real dirt, a canvas backpack softened by miles. He didn’t come in with the soft-focus sympathy some men wear like cologne; he just took a sip from a dented thermos and asked, “You missed it too?”
“Wrong terminal,” I said, swiping at my face.
He smiled like he’d heard the punchline before. “Same. Maybe we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be.”
I wanted to say, “Absolutely not,” but the sentence cracked something open. We started with flights and, without warning, slid into the deep end—jobs, regrets, the version of yourself you put in storage. I told him about the poems I hadn’t written since college, the tiny press I used to fantasize about, the way my current life felt like wearing a coat three sizes too small.
He told me he’d been in finance once, the kind that turns “quarterly” into a religion. Then his sister died—he never said her name—and the desk felt like a coffin lid. He sold the glossy version of his life, bought a van, and started moving. Odd jobs. Long roads. A different kind of ledger.
I didn’t ask for his name. He didn’t ask for mine. At some point the crying stopped, and so did the compulsion to stare at the departures board like it owed me an apology. An agent called his rebooked flight. He stood, slung the backpack on, and said, “If you’re ever in Santa Fe, check out The Blue Finch Café. Good poetry readings on Thursdays. You’d fit right in.”
No number. No promise. Just a breadcrumb and a smile, and then he was gone.
I never went to Phoenix. I went home and quit instead. I stitched together part-time freelancing—editing, copy, the odd blog post—and started writing again. The first poems were rusty and too earnest, but they were mine. Months later, on an impulse that felt like tugging a thread, I booked a cheap ticket to Santa Fe. “Blue Finch” had sounded like a dare.
The café was small and stubborn—chalkboard menu, mismatched chairs, books stacked on the windowsill. Open mic Thursday. I hadn’t planned to read, but my name was suddenly on the list and my napkin poem was suddenly in my shaking hands. A few claps. A nod from a man near the back. Afterward he introduced himself as Colin, the owner. “Ever submit to journals?” he asked. He was starting a tiny imprint. Would I send him more work?
I assumed he was being kind. He wasn’t. He emailed. He followed up. A zine turned into a chapbook, and the chapbook found a micro-press in Portland that understood small things can matter. My book didn’t chart or trend or sparkle on a list; it found people anyway. Messages arrived: “Your poem let me cry for the first time in years.” “I felt seen.” That was more than I knew to hope for.
Workshops followed. Readings. A few paying gigs that didn’t make me apologize for the word “poet.” Then a tiny writers’ retreat in Taos sent the guest list for logistics. One name stopped me: Navin Singh.
I Googled and felt my stomach drop. Not a backpack ghost at all. The founder of Lightseed, the investment firm our econ professor once called “a revolution disguised as a fund”—arts grants, social ventures—and a man who had evaporated from public life after a family tragedy. He had walked away from a life with commas in it and never looked back.
At the retreat, I saw him across the room—same crinkled eyes, same battered thermos. He beat me to it. “Wrong terminal girl,” he said, grinning.
We talked until the chairs were empty and the coffee went cold. This time we traded names. I told him about Santa Fe, the café, the book. “That one conversation changed everything,” I admitted.
He shook his head gently. “You changed everything. I just gave you a nudge.”
We kept in touch, the way people do when no one is trying to be impressive. No romance; just a steady, quiet line. He sent writing prompts when I stalled. I mailed him new work with stamps that never matched. He only gave notes if I asked. Mostly, he said, “Keep going. It’s honest.”
Months later, after a reading in Denver, a woman approached me with a photograph. “I’m Tali,” she said. “My brother used to talk about you.”
Her brother: Navin. The sister I’d assumed was gone stood right in front of me. She told me she had disappeared from her life for a while, the kind of fog people mistake for a farewell. Navin thought she was dead for a time, then found her and protected the quiet she needed to be alive again. “He said meeting you helped him heal,” she told me. “Not because you looked like me—but because you were still fighting for yourself.”
I carried that sentence around like a stone I worried smooth: the idea that you can, by accident, reflect someone’s survival back to them.
In spring, Colin called from The Blue Finch. A donor had funded a writers-in-residence program for the café—enough money for workshops, stipends, a little cottage out back. “I can’t say who,” he said, teasing what didn’t need to be said.
So this is where I am now. I live in a sun-warmed adobe behind the café. I teach poetry to teenagers who write like the page is the first door that’s ever opened for them. I’m working on a second book. On Thursdays, I light a candle near the mic and leave a seat open in the back—the one where he nodded, the one where I learned what a nudge can do.
People love stories about big breaks because they come with fireworks. Mine came with a missed flight, a dented thermos, and a stranger who didn’t try to fix me. I thought I had wasted time, taken the wrong path, arrived at the wrong terminal. Turns out the delay was the map.
If you’re reading this feeling stuck—late, lost, convinced the door you needed closed a long time ago—let me be the one to tell you: you haven’t missed it. Not even close. Sometimes the universe hands you a stranger to remind you who you are. Sometimes you’re the stranger who reminds someone else.
If this nudged you, pass it on. Someone out there is crying over almonds at the wrong gate, and it might be the best thing that ever happens to them.