Lost, Robbed, and Fourteen Minutes From Losing the Flight Too

The last morning of the trip was supposed to be easy. Pack, metro to the airport express, home by night. I gave myself three hours of buffer, which felt generous, and I would need every second of it, because the city of Grausee decided to teach me one final lesson.

It started with the wrong line. The metro map at Ostplatz had a colour I could not distinguish from another colour in that light, and I boarded confidently and rode twenty minutes in exactly the wrong direction before the announcements stopped matching anything on my route and the stations turned into a district of warehouses I had never heard of. I got off, disoriented, on a platform with no staff and signage in abbreviations I could not parse, and stood there turning my paper ticket over as if it would explain itself.

That is when it happened, and I did not even feel it. A press of people getting on, a moment of jostling I put down to rush hour, and it was only when I reached for my phone to check the map that I found the outside pocket of my backpack open and light. Not just open. Slit. A clean cut along the seam, and my phone gone, and with it every map, every ticket, every timetable, my entire brain for this city. I actually spun around looking for a person to blame and there was no one, just the doors closing on a train pulling away.

So now I was lost, in a warehouse district, phoneless, with a flight leaving in a little under two hours and no way to navigate to it and no idea where I even was. I want to describe the particular cold that goes down your back at that moment. It is not sadness. It is math. Every second you stand still is a second the plane does not wait for.