Do Angels have birthdays?

Is November the cruelest month? It had happened in the month of November. At the time she had no idea why she was forced to do it. Only that it was a November, that ghastliest of months. She was sixteen at the time. And it was nearly four decades since she had last been to the city where it had happened. She swore when she left, she would never return. Now she had agreed to return. And it was November. She ordered another bland, airport coffee and tried to relax. She said she would travel alone. Was it really going to end like this? She sits in the departure lounge, lost in a sea of humanity. She clutches her boarding pass and carry-on bag, unperturbed by the soulless, expression-less faces on the sheep about to be herded aboard a technological miracle of engineering. She sits ghost-like, unperturbed as if the sea of humanity were looking straight through her. She now shuffles through the lines wondering what she is doing with her brain fraught with a kaleidoscope of words and phrases that refused to form into a coherent narrative. A narrative that might have had a happy ending. Once. She no longer believed in happy endings. She remembers those happy feelings leading up to the first time she sat foot in the city. She was thinking about what she had lost that November month and now those bitter memories were again forming in her mind. A few coherent phrases surfaced from the depths of despair, etched in a tombstone of memory. The years since had not eased the sense of loss, of wonder at what might have been. She heard the words still reverberating down the years, `you'll be ok, you'll be just fine'. So a bag was packed with tearful eyes and robotic fingers pressed the case keys. The tickets placed carefully in the plain, black handbag. She recalls the reflections in the rain splattered taxi window, all through the tortured ride to the airport, the rain forming images of the photograph he had shown her. She recalled the stomach churning, crying on the inside through a stoic mask of seeming indifference. Now she clutches her bags and sits alone, cold and numb and staring through blank faces. She wonders if her body would actually function and whether her legs would carry her onto the airplane. And then she is startled by the tannoy blaring that the airport bus will fetch the travelers to the waiting aircraft. She joins the merry band of travelers grateful that she does not have to perform any action requiring decision-making. For the fourth time that morning she presents her passport and witnessed the second glance at the photograph. She was travelling in her civilian clothes, as they always called them. In the photograph she was wearing a blue veil. `Thank you, sister' was the reply as the British Airways attendant smiled and handed back her passport and boarding card. She returned the smile graciously. This part of the journey has been prescribed for her but she has no stomach for it and what awaited her on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The dank, November drizzle matches her mood as she boards the bus for the journey across the tarmac. It was her first flight in ten years. That had been an internal flight from New York's JFK Airport to Chicago's O'Hare Airport. This was only her second ever long haul flight. The first brought her to the USA, alone and desperate. She is now returning, alone and numb. She moves along the walkway and enters the plane. Another smiling attendant bedecked in blue, red and white motions to the first aisle and seat 23A. `Thank you' she replies, ever gracious. She places the cabin bag in the storage bin and takes her window seat. A light drizzle is forming tiny rivulets down the wing as she stares out of the window. She recalls her first ever flight on a plane. It was Dublin Airport and all of forty years ago. It was a November day then and there were three of them.