Since coming to Notre Dame three years ago, I’ve done my fair share of travelling and have run into plenty of good and bad luck. Connecting flights can be one of my biggest pet peeves. Long layovers are excruciating, short layovers are stressful, and I’m always more than slightly annoyed when the powers-that-be assign me to the most roundabout connections. And having to put your life back together after you miss your connection kind of feels like the end of the world.
A few weeks ago, someone on Facebook shared this Buzzfeed article about a Reddit post of a Craigslist ad entitled “Missed Connection.” Filed in the personal ads section, the piece tells the story of a man who saw a woman on the New York City subway and fell in love at first sight without even having exchanged a word with her. However, both were too shy to say anything, and instead rode the subway in silence through all of its stops and back for fear of leaving and never seeing the other again. Further reading reveals that the piece is an allegory written by a Los Angeles writer/comedian named Raphael Bob-Waksberg. While it may or may not have been based on true events, it presents something that many people can relate or sympathize with, which probably explains the ad’s viral-level shares and reposts.
Towards the end of the summer, I had to make a quick trip to Connecticut. I didn’t have a lot of time since I was finishing up my internship in Nashville, and it didn’t help that there were no direct flights to Hartford. My best option was to connect in Atlanta, almost 300 miles out of the way, before flying up to Hartford and doing the same on the way back. I was on a very tight schedule, but luckily everything went exactly as planned. On the return trip, I had a center seat in between the aisle and window seats since I booked the flight late, but it was the last leg of the trip home so I figured I could deal with it. A guy wearing a black t-shirt sat down next to me in the aisle seat. I usually don’t attempt conversation with my neighbors on planes, but for some reason I initiated small talk by commenting on his iPad case (a lame icebreaker, I know, but it worked). We talked for the entire flight and I learned that his name was James, he was a Staff Sergeant in the army, and was stationed in Germany. He was on block leave and was heading to Nashville to visit a friend. We probably talked about everything, from our shared childhood love of Voltron (a science fiction anime show from the late 80’s) to his obsession with thrill-seeking adventures – he’d even taken part in the Running of the Bulls in Spain last year. It was one of the best dates I’d ever been on.
Once we landed, we continued to talk on our way out of the terminal before accepting the reality of the situation and parting ways. But I kept thinking to myself how unfair it was that I would never see him again. I tried to find him on Facebook but it was futile since we never exchanged last names. Eventually, I gave up and chalked it up to my life experiences, but then I read Bob-Waksberg’s piece. It turns out, it wasn’t just any personal ad – there is an entire sub-section of Craigslist personal ads called “missed connections.”
Take a look at these from South Bend. There are hundreds posted every month and almost a dozen or so posted every day. There’s also another separate website dedicated only to missed connections. I considered putting up an ad of my own, but unfortunately you need an exact location, and “20,000 feet above ground level somewhere between Georgia and Tennessee” doesn’t exactly correspond to an address. And even if I knew which city James’s army base is in, it turns out Craigslist-Germany is actually entirely written in German. However, it’s still nice to know that thousands, if not millions of people around the world have been in the same situation. And I’m glad that I had James and Raphael Bob-Waksberg to remind me to appreciate all of the relationships, however fleeting, of which life is made.
But for what it’s worth, if anyone knows an Army Staff Sergeant stationed in Germany named James who grew up in Aurora, IL, gave up a wrestling scholarship and joined the army after high school instead, has a dog and a house in North Carolina that his friend takes care of, who works with computers and information security, who knows about social engineering, who loves skydiving, and has a tattoo on his left bicep and one around his right forearm that he got in Iraq –
Tell him that I’m looking for him.