Literally up till the day before leaving for Ghana I thought about everything else but for the fact that I was going to live in Africa for 6 weeks. It didn’t occur to me to buy some Ghana travel guides or extra bed sheets or even bug spray up till the night of my 16-hour flight from LAX to JFK then to my final destination: Accra, Ghana.
After staying up all night trying to conjure up the items that I needed for my stay abroad in my bedroom (and failing), I had two meltdowns and tried my best to keep the tears at bay while stuffing my suitcases with clothes – cause that’s all I had.
I was wretched throughout the whole drive to LAX. My mind was plagued with “what if’’s” and worst case scenarios of missing the plane or losing my luggage or, the worst of all, not having confirmed my plane ticket.
While scanning my online print out of my ticket (for the first time) I see some small print at the bottom saying, “For international flights, please confirm your ticket at least 48 hours in advance.” Uh, what?
Buying the nonrefundable ticket wasn’t confirmation enough?
It was less than two hours before the plane was departing and I definitely did not “confirm” the ticket by any means.
By the time I got out of the car I was doing everything I could from holding back the tears. When I was denied by the front check-in and the do-it-yourself computer screen flashed “See Agent” I couldn’t handle it anymore. I started to cry. What if I didn’t actually buy the ticket? What if I didn’t CONFIRM IT?
“Please confirm your ticket at least 48 hours in advance.”
With my tears and stress etched on my face an airport agent let me cut the line and the ticket agent passed me through with no “Sorry m`amm I can’t find your ticket.”
And though I got my boarding pass, checked in my baggage, went through security and collapsed into a terminal chair at gate 53B with no problems other than the mental state of my head I was still at the whims of an existential crisis.
Not getting the confirmation for my ticket threw me into a plaguing doubt of whether I got confirmation to go on this trip at all. I was trying too hard and stressing out so much to get myself to freaking Africa that perhaps this was God’s way of telling me not to go. The right thing shouldn’t be so hard to do. While waiting for the airplane people to call my zone number I realized that not only did I fail to confirm my ticket I also never got a “confirmation” from God (whatever that was supposed to look like).
As I was sitting in the boarding terminal with no makeup, my hair unbrushed and sniffling with my red eyes I probably looked like a junior high kid whose irresponsible mother let her ride the plane by herself too early. The people around me are mumbling to each other while eyeing me such as the family of Europeans sitting across from me. Though we made eye contact twice they refused to stare down, apparently waiting to see when my next break down will be or to see when they could sweep in and tell on me to the authorities to send me packing back home. “This girl is too young to board the plane alone!”
I still can’t figure out what was causing such severe emotional turmoil inside of me. Hopefully I’ll pull it together in the next 16 hours.
