I met a stranger on a plane,
while the sky trembled around us
and the metal shell we trusted
felt suddenly too small, too fragile,
too close to falling.
In the quiet panic between heartbeats,
he took my hand
As if he had known me
from somewhere before fear existed
and opened a door into his world.
For a moment,
the shaking ceased to matter.
We were no longer
a fragile thing suspended in air,
but two souls
anchored in a connection
He spoke in stories
soft, steady threads of a life well-worn
and left me with words
I now carry like keepsakes
in the hidden pockets of my days.
He does not know it,
but somewhere between his laughter
and the way he saw me,
he returned something I had misplaced
a quiet piece of myself
I thought was gone for good.
In the way he spoke of my smile,
he gave the world its color again,
restored a kind of beauty
my eyes had forgotten how to find.
And in the borrowed hours above the earth,
I fell in love
not just with him,
but with the light
that came rushing back through me.
The world felt brighter
because of it.
I met a stranger on a plane,
and somewhere between takeoff and landing,
he danced his way
out of the unfamiliar
and into something like family
just before our feet
touched the ground again.