Okay, the title of this is a bit of a misnomer because obviously the real ultimate airline nightmare would be going down somewhere over the Pacific, ne’er to be seen from again, which is not what happened to me (although, once it almost did). The story I am about to tell you is not the ultimate nightmare, but it is MY personal nightmare, one that has plagued my dreams in many forms for years and that finally came alive on a Tuesday in October in Palermo, Italy.

Let me start at the beginning. This particular nightmare goes WAY, WAY BACK to that one day in first grade, when I got all the way to school without my backpack. It was not so much the forgetting of the backpack that troubled me, I was in first grade, I forgot things ALL THE TIME, but rather the way in which I forgot it. My brain had completely convinced itself that it did, in fact, have possession of the backpack, when actually the backpack was who-knows-where. I had memories of putting the backpack into the car, but then, dum, dum, dum, IT WASN’T THERE.

Here I am on my way to first grade with the backpack in question. Luckily I didn’t lose the fanny pack because that would have been a real crisis.

First grade, already #soenduro.

This was a traumatic event of my childhood but it was hardly an isolated occasion. It happened again and again and again. I lost lunch boxes and favorite hats and important field-trip permission forms. Eventually, probably by the time I was nine or ten, I came to the only logical conclusion — I could not trust my brain. Thus began an unattractive and borderline obsessive habit of double checking. Actually, the term double-checking doesn’t really do it justice. We’re talking times-twenty-checking. Did I have an important essay due in my last class of the day? Then I would be checking to make sure I had it every twenty minutes, because, who knows what could have happened since the last time I checked it, my errant brain might have decided to rip it into shreds and flush it down the toilet because afterall, that’s the problem with not trusting your brain, you just NEVER KNOW.

College and giving-less-shits-about-due-dates allowed me to loosen up in this regard, but those times when I really, really REALLY need to have something, like, ahem, say, my passport…well, it’s still an issue. When I’m in an airport, it’s pretty much everything I can do to keep myself from checking to confirm that I have all the necessary paperwork every 30 seconds. Yes, it drives Macky nuts, and yes I wish I could stop doing it. The problem is that whenever I let down my guard and start trusting myself, terrible things happen. Like that time in Argentina when I lost the “EXTREMELY IMPORTANT WHATEVER YOU DO DO NOT LOSE THIS” piece of paper with 10 gagillion signatures and stamps on it that I needed to get my student visa. That was really really bad, and I still, for the life of me, have no idea where it could have gone. Betrayed by my brain, yet again.

The point is this — I have a reoccurring nightmare that one day I’m going to show up somewhere without something I need, despite being convinced that I am in possession of the thing in question. I won’t have my passport or my backpack or, as actually happened on that Tuesday in Italy, my flight reservation.

Yes, it happened. I showed up in Palermo, ready to get on the plane, more than ready to be home, only to discover that Brussels Air had no idea I existed. WOOOOOOPS. This was a very bad moment — it was basically the pinnacle of a lifelong nightmare and I kinda lost my shit. The whole situation taxed my coping mechanisms way past their limits. I was already tired, not to mention just a wee bit burnt out on all things public transportation, and I was already facing a miserably long flight with an 18 hour layover. The last thing I needed was to spend ANOTHER day (or week? or month? or the rest of my life?) in Palermo. Oh, and no surprise, I was also out of money and the woman behind the desk seemed to be suggesting that my best bet was to buy another ticket. OKAY GREAT IDEA I’LL JUST BUY ANOTHER 1200 DOLLAR TICKET AWESOME IDEA THANKS. I say “seemed to be suggesting” because my Italian is atrocious and her English was, um, better, but not better enough. Eventually I started crying (typical female trump card, I know, but I was in full panic mode) and she decided to pass me off on someone else, which turned out to be a good thing for everyone involved.

The second agent was able to clear things up somewhat — turns out my return reservation had been accidentally canceled by United when they had re-arranged my reservation on the way out. Of course, this didn’t really fix anything because the flights I was supposed to be on were all full, and yadda yadda yadda, but I was bolstered by the realization that, for once, things had gone colossally wrong and it wasn’t even my fault. This was comforting because, whatever happened, I could always write a really nasty letter to United.

Not this trip, thankfully, but the sentiment was the same…

Spoiler — everything turned out okay. The ticket agent eventually got me on a different flight and I eventually made it back to the US, in business class, no less. And I got a $200 voucher from United for my troubles, although what good that will do me is yet to be seen. I also learned some things — for example, my coping mechanisms are all over the map. In the hour that it took to sort everything out, I experienced such an overwhelming torrent of emotions…anger, panic, fear, confusion, frustration at my seeming inability to keep my shit together. Logically, of course, I knew this wasn’t the actual end of world. If I had to, I would lay down the plastic, gtfo of Italy and deal with debt later. I wasn’t permanently stranded. I had resources. I would figure it out. It was going to be okay. I kept reminding myself of all these things, and yet, I still lost my shit in a pretty epic and (especially now that everything turned out perfectly fine) embarrassing manner.

It’s not like this is the first time I’ve had a disastrous airline experience. There was that time Macky and my flight to New Zealand had to emergency land in Honolulu. Or the time I spent my 21st birthday in Reagan International thanks to weather delays. But this was so much worse, because for about half an hour I thought it was all my fault, that my brain had somehow betrayed me into forgetting to make my flight reservation. Or something. I don’t know what I thought. What I do know is that I was so, so, soooo relieved that this was actually someone else’s fuckup. Oh, and that I spent the rest of my travel experience (18 hours in Brussels, 10 hour flight to DC) checking to make sure I had my passport.

What’s YOUR travel nightmare? And how do you cope when it comes to life?