How much does a ton of lead weigh?

That's what my heart felt like when the plane from LaGuardia came and went and she was not on board. I talked with a few passengers and crew as they were coming off of the plane last night. I went up and down the stairs looking frantically at the two possible entrances that arriving passengers use. Nothing. I went over to the information booth near baggage claim. No help. I went to the lost luggage area and asked a Delta clerk to look in the computer for my passenger. Her name was there because they knew her first name after I had only given the woman her last name. This woman provided no useful information. All questions in my mind are still in play.

So I wandered around a bit hoping that somehow I missed her. Not. Finally I went over to the Delta ticketing counter and asked if she might have missed the connecting flight. The woman there told me that her reservation from LaGuardia to Boston was cancelled. She told me that that shuttle was the final one from LaGuardia for the day. Okay. Perhaps it was cancelled because she got held up at customs at JFK. Perhaps she will rebook it in the morning. So I dejectedly drove home after paying $14 in parking fees and tolls to get out of the airport. Must have driven 90 mph all the way home. I'm thinking since she didn't call me like I'd asked, maybe she sent me an email or an instant message. Nope. I got home about 11:15 PM last night and found nothing. Not a single message. Zip. Zero. Nada. Nyet.

Needless to say I didn't get much sleep last night worrying over the possibilties of what had actually happened.

So I called my sister and left a message for her to call me. She is a travel agent and also works part time for US Air. Maybe she could find out more details than I could, having an inside connection. When she called me back a little bit later she did have more details. Not good. She told me that the Delta reservation was cancelled on June 30 (four or five days after the reservation was made), and no ticket was ever issued. She also said that the file in the computer hadn't been touched since then. My sister had only known sketchy details of my whole conversational experience with this person, so her independent confirmation was like icing on the cake.

So the reality begins to sink in that she never intended to fly to visit me after all. The question still remains if she was even on the flight from Moscow to JFK. That one is hard to tell, since both reservations were made through Aeroflot's computer system. But at this point I doubt it.

What kind of person do you have to be to intentionally deceive someone for 10 days and never have the person suspect that you are lying about your true intentions? In reviewing the text of all our conversations, I could not tell that she was lying to me the whole time.

So I spent today in and out of bed, in a half daze, shocked, emotionally hurt, mad, pissed off and every emotion in between. I didn't eat anything for most of the day, until about 6:30 PM when I made myself eat breakfast (gotta love frozen Eggo waffles.) Yes, breakfast. That's how out of it I have been all day.

My mom called tonight to see if I was okay. Apparently my sister called them to advise that my woman had not come. It was nice to hear. P, my college buddy, was on Yahoo messenger tonight, so I briefly told him she didn't come, without divulging any further details. Needless to say, I'm writing all of this so I don't have to repeat the same story a million times.

I wonder how well I'll sleep tonight, after sleeping away most of the day. Probably not well.