If someone decided to make a romantic comedy out of my life, it would be absolutely brilliant right up until the part where the guy and the girl are supposed to live happily ever after, because invariably some unforeseen and unsurmountable circumstance would prevent the guy from getting the girl.

Thursday night I was on a plane from Minneapolis to Portland, returning from yet another trip to North Carolina. For some reason that I have yet to discern, nighttime flights always seem to be full of attractive young women. On this particular flight, I was seated across the aisle from an angel.

I first saw her in line at the gate. She was in front of me. Tall; about my height. Long blonde hair. Thin but not skinny. When the ticket agent had trouble scanning her ticket, she smiled the sweetest, most beautiful smile I had ever seen. This was not the sort of smile that you use on a random airline employee. This smile betrayed a kind of inner kindness and beauty that, until I saw it, I thought only existed in fairy tales and dreams. What were the odds that, out of over one hundred seats, this girl would end up sitting next to me? I seem to be a magnet for coincidence.

I caught her eye once or twice as we settled into our seats and she even smiled that smile at me. I was perplexed. We hadn’t spoken to each other, but I knew I had to ask her out. But how? And when? If I asked her on the plane and she said no, that could result in three unbearable hours of awkwardness. And obviously I couldn’t talk to her during the flight, because what if I screwed it up? What if the conversation lapsed? What if she told me she had a boyfriend? What if she was only meeting a connecting flight in Portland? What then? No. That wouldn’t do. I resolved to speak to her on the ground in Portland and not sooner.

We both slept on the flight. Several times I woke up, stretched, and glanced over at her, only to find her stretching and glancing at me. Each time it happened we would both smile and look away. I wondered if it meant anything or if it was just coincidence again. I noticed that she bore a slight resemblance to Loren’s girlfriend, Anna. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” I thought, “if her name was Anna?”

Finally, the plane landed in Portland. I tried to be a gentleman and let her go first, but she smiled and said she needed to get her bag from the overhead bin. Ack. This meant I ended up way ahead of her in the stream of people leaving the plane. I slowed my pace, trying to look casual. Eventually, she emerged. I let her walk past me, then matched my pace to hers. The airport was nearly empty except for the passengers from our flight. Onward we walked, towards the baggage claim, as I tried to formulate a sentence.

Finally, I forced myself into action. I caught up to her, raised my arm slightly in greeting, opened my mouth to speak, and she stopped suddenly and kneeled to get something out of her bag, oblivious to my approach. I was in mid-stride, with my arm extended and my mouth agape. Newton’s first law of motion dictated that I either keep moving or fall over. There was nothing I could do but keep walking and pretend nothing had happened. Coincidence had defeated me.

But wait! As I walked away, silently berating myself for missing such a wonderful opportunity, she glided past me on the moving walkway. I couldn’t believe it. Coincidence had not abandoned me after all! It was like a scene in a movie. But she was now ahead of me, and the distance between us was quickly increasing since she was moving at twice my speed.

Felicity’s half-joking advice from a few weeks earlier echoed through my head: “Just pretend you’re in a movie, Ryan.” What would Tom Hanks do? Tom Hanks would run like a mad fool and catch her, that’s what he would do.

I ran like a mad fool and caught her.

“Excuse me,” I said. She turned, still walking, me still running beside her. “I’ve been trying (pant, pant) for the last three hours (pant, pant) to work up the courage (pant, pant) to ask you for your phone number.”

All I could see then was her smile, filling her beautiful, reddening face, and all I could hear was her laughter. It was laughter of happiness, not the laughter of pity I had been half-expecting. My heart dashed itself resoundingly against my chest, as if attempting to escape, and then seemed to stop entirely. I was so taken aback by all of these things that I completely failed to notice the end of the moving walkway and kept right on running.

She ran up beside me, still smiling and blushing. Completely embarrassed, I slowed to a walk.

“Do you live in Portland?” she asked.

“Yes!” I said, gleefully. Her smile melted into a frown.

“I’m here for a job interview. I fly out Saturday morning. I’m sorry. That’s so sweet of you, though!”

I was stunned. Disappointed. Angry. Fate had toyed with me once more only to stab me in the back.

I told her I thought she seemed like a very sweet person, and that I had never done this before, but that I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t asked. We chatted as we walked. She asked me what I did. “I write software,” I said, meekly, and yet she seemed genuinely interested. She had majored in Civil Engineering at OSU; what a coincidence, said I, because I had almost gone to OSU myself. Finally, I told her my name. She told me hers.

Her name was Anna.

We said goodbye and I wished her luck with her interview. She took the escalator down to the baggage claim. I took the escalator up to my car.

And let me tell you the worst thing: I completely forgot to give her any way to contact me if she ends up getting that job and moving to Portland. All she knows about me is my first name and that I write software. All I know about her is that her name is Anna and that she is perfect.

Oh, and I checked: searching for “ryan software engineer” on Google doesn’t return wonko.com.

Fuck you, Fate.

Update: My readers and friends, being the coolest people in the known universe, have begun a Googlebombing campaign to have Google return this post when searching for the keywords “ryan software engineer” or “ryan software engineer portland”, in the hopes that Anna was so smitten that she is desperately trying to find me via web searches.

Far-fetched or not, in only two days wonko.com has been bumped up to number 6 in the results for “ryan software engineer portland”. Take that, fate.