Fear, faith, and a bartender named Philip.

Sometimes hope is in the bottom of a bourbon glass.

I heard the screams first.

And just as I looked up to see where they were coming from, BLAM. I got knocked fucking flat on my ass in the middle of the floor of the Atlanta airport. I was ready to get up and cut a bitch when I realized that the guy who had mowed me down was the first of a fucking stampede of people.

After I yanked out my earbud, I could hear the “Oh my God he’s got a GUN” and out of instinct mixed with sheer fucking confusion, I scuttled behind the ticket counter nearby realizing that more than likely, there was another fucking psychopath mowing people down with an assault weapon in a public place…and he was 20 yards from me.

The airline employee scrambled up and over the counter while shouting “HERE HE COMES HERE HE COMES”, his lanyard getting twisted around his face while he landed in a heap behind the huddled herd of us already on the floor.

That was the moment that I started to shake violently and start to believe that I might actually fucking die. Right there. And I wondered if the metal of the ticket counter was thick enough to stop bullets and who would tell my daughter as I held the young woman next to me close while she sobbed and prayed.

Seconds passed. Then minutes. More shots never came. What did come was a hulking TSA officer booming at us to MOVE MOVE MOVE OUT OUT OUT, trying to get us all to evacuate the building amid still more screaming and running. I had no idea if there was still someone with a gun on the loose, nor did the panicked human who used my fucking head and shoulder as a stepstool as he scrambled himself over the luggage scale to break for the door.

We ran.

Someone collided with a father sprinting with a stroller and I watched his fucking infant child go skittering across the floor and someone else mercifully block the stampede so that poor, terrified man could collect his now-screaming baby and run with the rest of us. There were people face down all across the floor amongst the abandoned luggage and I had no idea if they were alive or dead.

Out the door, through the parking garage, down the ramp. Out out out. Far. All I wanted was out and fucking far. As far as I could get.

At the end of the road leading from the terminal, bedraggled humans slowed down. Runs turned to heaving, breathless walking and shaking and we came together in small packs, borrowing phones from the people that had them since many left all their belongings behind. By some fucking miracle, I had my shoulder bag and phone still with me, so I loaned my phone to several trembling people to call parents, friends, loved ones to tell them that they were safe.

Safe.

I called my daughter to tell her I was safe. My mom and brother. Texted friends. Managed to hitch a ride with a different kind stranger to a gas station at the outskirts of the airport property so I could finally fucking think.

What we learned later was that the shots we heard (was it one, was it three, who the fuck knows, none of us can agree) was a man (a felon, as it happened) who had put his loaded fucking gun through security at the airport. And when TSA pulled his luggage aside to inspect it and unearthed the weapon, the man dove for it, the gun “went off”, and he ran. The HERE HE COMES was in reference to this fucker running out the door of the airport, feet from where I was cowered behind that Godforsaken fucking ticket counter. The airport insists it was an “accidental” discharge and there was “no danger” but last I checked, even accidental bullets fucking kill people and I don’t know how you fucking accidentally bring a loaded fucking gun to an airport and through security and we surely didn’t know any of that at the time, anyway. In fact, I’m pretty fucking sure we all believed we were going to die.

I was fine physically and totally not fine mentally, and somehow with the help of My People, I managed to get myself a few miles on foot to the car rental and get in a car and get myself to a hotel. I don’t remember much about this part. It’s really fucking blurry, if I’m honest. A lot of crying and a lot of shaking. I puked once in the parking garage behind some fucking Kia something or other and I only know that because I remember the nameplate by the side of my head as I retched.

At the hotel, after surely unsettling the poor woman who checked me in amidst my confusion and trembling hands fumbling with the credit card machine, I sat down on the edge of my bed on the 29th floor and sobbed until I couldn’t fucking breathe through my snotty nose. But when the tears couldn’t come anymore, I knew I also couldn’t fucking handle being alone. So, I went to the bar.

And behind the bar there was Philip.

Philip was jovial and loud, with a round and warm island-ish accent through his mask, and his eyes glittered with mischief. His bombastic laugher rang while he cut up with patrons at the end of the bar. I melted wearily onto a bar stool and when he made his way to me with the traditional coaster greeting, I tilted my head to look up at him. His eyes immediately changed.

Softly, gently: “Are you okay, young miss?”

No, I told him. I was decidedly not in any way fucking okay but that I would please like a glass of wine and Sauvignon Blanc was my usual but anything cold and not Chardonnay would be fine because Chardonnay is fucking terrible, ha ha pretend laughter.

In that moment, he did the most extraordinary thing.

My hands were on the bar, trembling again, and I fidgeted with the corner of the laminated menu I stared at just to have something to fucking do. I tried a feeble smile of thanks across what were surely swollen and red cheeks and attempted to be as normal and glued together as a broken human can appear to be. And all Philip did was stop what he was doing, reach across the bar, and put his hand on mine.

He didn’t say a word in that moment. Not a single thing. He simply looked in my eyes, gave my hand a gentle squeeze, and nodded. Then he waited until I nodded back, squeezed my hand once more, and let go.

Philip came back with an empty glass and a full, cold bottle. He poured. I drank.

When the tears came—and they just. kept. fucking. coming—he first slid me napkins. Then tissues. A nearby waitress came over then and put a little travel-sized package of tissues on the bar next to me with a reassuring hand on my shoulder. At some point in a calm moment, I told Philip I’d been at the airport and some vague, messy account of what had happened.

Philip listened gravely and attentively. Then, in his beachy baritone, said simply “You are here with me now, and you are safe.”

I cried some more. When the wine was gone, Philip brought me a Manhattan. Extra Luxardos. He brought me food I didn’t order and bade me simply, eat.

While I halfheartedly picked at chicken tenders and watched football on the televisions and listened to the gaggle of sorority sisters at their reunion and let the sounds of the bar wrap me in familiar while desperately trying to numb the fucking screams echoing in my head with Maker’s Mark, Philip was never more than a few feet away. Even when he left to go to the other side of the bar and serve a customer, he came back to perch nearby. Never crowding me, but never so far that I couldn’t look up and find him there.

During one of the unwitting teary overflows, I caught Philip’s eye a few feet away again at his unofficial sentinel post. I offered some awkward, waving gesture of God I’m sorry look at me I’m a fucking mess I’m so sorry I don’t know what’s wrong with me why the fuck can’t I stop crying I’m sorry to be that asshole this is so fucking embarrassing. He pulled his mask down just for a moment, looked at me kindly but squarely, and mouthed the words:

You’re safe.

I think I believed him that time. A little bit, at least.

I couldn’t be where I wanted in that moment. I couldn’t hug my daughter or be hugged by anyone who loved me and would protect me. I wasn’t home in my bed with my dogs and in familiar surroundings and I didn’t want to be in the strange bed and silence upstairs. I was alone and afraid and so very exhausted. And I didn’t even yet know how I was going to get home.

But Philip was there with me. In that noisy bar, hundreds of oblivious people somehow conducting their normal fucking lives all around us. An out-of-context guardian of a rumpled-up woman, never making a big fuss of watching over me but doing so just the same.

I’m not sure when or how those sounds and images will leave me. If they’ll leave me. I’m okay now, all things considered, and I know it could have been so much fucking worse. So much worse.

Parts of humanity sometimes feel really fucking broken. It’s hard not to look around and despair and rage and wonder what the everloving fuck we are doing to ourselves and to each other. Hope and faith feels really fucking out of reach sometimes.

But someone I love—someone with decidedly more faith and depth of grace than I, most days— told me that at other times, the people we find ourselves with turn out to be exactly who and what we need in that moment. He said universal or divine intervention isn’t always direct or first hand and that humans can be the very best of us in the simplest of ways…and the most profound. He believed Philip was there simply because I needed him to be.

So, perhaps our the hope in our tattered, upside-down world lies with the Philips.

With the people who are present in the most unlikely moments, greeting strangers with softness and care and a tender touch. Or with the people who bring the bottle when you only asked for a glass because they just fucking know. Maybe it’s with the people who add extra cherries because the little things matter. And with the people who never stand too far away when they know there is hurt happening nearby.

I am so afraid of what I saw that day. Still. Maybe always.

But that evening, I also found a tiny little shred of comfort, safety and hope in a crowded hotel bar at the bottom of a bourbon glass. Not because of what had been in it, but because of the soul of the man who had poured it.

May we all be a little bit of Philip, today and always, and in the darkest of moments continue to believe that light, gentleness, and goodness can still yet win.

With love,

Amber