Aligned & Awake: The Flight That Wouldn’t End
When the sky shut down the Toronto Airport, I learned endings look more like farce than ceremony.
Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.
The day begins with a bus called the Super Loop.
A name that promises rollercoaster thrills, but it’s really just a coach with wi-fi that doesn’t work. The ticket is cheap, though the price includes a free side of bad B.O. and the lingering smell of ham sandwiches from 1994. Still, it gets you to Heathrow, and that’s the only qualification that matters.
I arrive too early to check in my bag, so I wander toward Caffé Nero. Three men in aprons are standing five feet from the counter, deep in conversation, each pretending I don’t exist. We lock eyes. Nothing. They’re guarding the till like three grumpy gargoyles.
Eventually, a young woman steps in, sighs, and serves me. She hands me a matcha latte, the colour of swamp water, the greener the better.
Of course, I spill it. Straight down the centre of my white t-shirt. Not a casual drip. A full green waterfall.
It looks like I’ve either baptized myself or projectile vomited mid-sentence.
So I pull on a sweater, trying not to look like the world’s oldest toddler.
Heathrow, meanwhile, is eerily quiet. Usually, it’s a carnival of duty-free perfumes and toddlers in meltdown. Today it feels like a library after closing.
It’s eclipse day, so perhaps even Heathrow got the memo: everyone, shut up, the sky is working.
Boarding is its usual game of human origami. Fold yourself into a seat designed by someone who hates legs.
My knees touch the seat in front, and the woman ahead of me promptly reclines. She went back so far I half expected her to start juggling.
My kneecaps are now embossed into her seatback. A fossil record of economy class.
Seven hours later, Toronto appears on the little seatback map. Then we loop.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
We’re circling Toronto like a drunk uncle who can’t find the driveway. The captain eventually admits Pearson Airport is closed due to storms. We’re going to Ottawa.
Ottawa greets us by… not greeting us. No gate, no terminal, no movement. We sit in the middle of the tarmac like an abandoned IKEA order for three hours.
It’s nearly midnight. I collect my bag, book a Holiday Inn while standing at the carousel, and take an Uber through the rain.
At 1:30 a.m., I open the beige door of a beige room with beige curtains and collapse onto the world’s lumpiest mattress.
Air Canada emails me a new flight for 9 a.m.
It feels like a love letter.
Sleep, however, is not invited. My body is vibrating with that specific exhaustion where you’re too tired to rest, too awake to surrender.
By dawn, I’m back at the airport, rejoining the same passengers from last night. They’re wearing the same clothes, the same despair. Some admit they slept on the floor.
We wait again because the crew hasn’t shown up yet. Eventually, forty-five minutes late, we lift off.
By the time we land in Toronto, the sky has cracked open, rain pouring down like God himself was pressure-washing the city.
It was September 21st.
The autumn equinox.
The solar eclipse in Virgo.
The final curtain call of Virgo season.
And September itself, in numerology, is a nine — the number of endings.
The whole cosmos is standing on the wing of the plane with a megaphone shouting, Release!
And of course, in my life, that doesn’t look like a candlelit ceremony or a sage bundle.
It looks like spilling swamp-green tea down my shirt.
It looks like circling Toronto three times like a drunk pigeon.
It looks like being abandoned in Ottawa at midnight with a key card that opens to a beige Holiday Inn and a bed that feels like it’s been filled with old encyclopedias.
That’s how the universe delivers endings to me, slapstick.
Life doesn’t end things politely. It doesn’t knock and say, “Excuse me, Tanya, would you like to release what no longer serves you?”
No.
It hurls a drink down your front.
It cancels your flight.
It traps you on a tarmac for three hours with strangers who’ve all gone a little feral.
Endings arrive in chaos. In comedy. They wobble in like Edina from Absolutely Fabulous, cackling and holding a champagne flute at the wrong moment.
And it is fitting. After the year I’ve had, betrayal, heartbreak, starting over at forty-five, of course, the universe wouldn’t tie it up in silk ribbons.
It would laugh.
It would say:
“Yes, darling, endings are here. But we’ll do them my way: delayed flights, spilled matcha, and an overnight stay in Ottawa.”
Call it slapstick closure, call it cosmic comedy; either way, the curtain has fallen.
And I’m ready for the lights to rise on what’s next.
Tell me…
What’s the most ridiculous travel saga you’ve ever survived? Delays, spills, seatmates from hell? Drop it in the comments. Misery loves company and comedy.
Keeping a sense of humor in the midst of it all is key to survival :-)!