The Third Ticket

Ashley and I had met a few English girls when we were travelling in Morocco. They were on holidays and we all got along quite well, so we decided to take a train together from Rabat to Meknes. Ash and I strode up to the ticket counter at the train station, and I mentally prepped to use my broken French once again. It was a busy morning and the man behind the counter was either particularly stressed or just wasn't in the mood to deal with tourists who had terrible accents. I thought my French had been extra-rusty and had led to some miscommunication because, for some reason, despite the fact that I asked only for two train tickets, he shoved three slips of paper at me under the little pane of glass that separated us. "No, deux billets, s'il vous plait, seulement deux." He kept shoving them towards me and waved us off nonchalantly. Ash and I examined the little slips. Maybe the extra one is a receipt, we thought. No, it was definitely another train ticket, even though we only paid for two fares. Oh well, there's no point in fussing over it now, we figured, so we shoved them into our pockets and boarded the train.

I grabbed my journal and a pen. "I'm going to go sit by the door," I said to the girls as I got out of my seat. I never did like the air conditioning in the cars and much preferred the winds rushing around me as we sped through the country. The winds were strong that day. I couldn't even write because the pages were flapping everywhere and my hair kept blowing into my eyes. So I just sat there, half of me hanging out the door, and enjoyed the moment; being by myself on a train in Morocco - until a man came and told me I couldn't have the door open and sit on the floor like that, to go back to my seat. He was also checking tickets, and requested that I hand mine over. I reached into my pockets only to find that they were empty. I fished around some more, flipped through my journal, and the realization hit me that the strong winds might have actually blown the ticket right out of my pocket as I hung out there. The pants were loose and flappy, and the pockets certainly shallow enough for something small and papery to fly right out of them. Crap, I thought. I took a breath, and told the man to follow me, that my friend had my ticket.

"Ash, where's that third ticket?" I whispered urgently. "What? Why?" she asked. "I need it, mine's gone - where is it?" She took it out of her pack, handed it to me and I promptly handed it to the man who punched a tiny little hole in it, validating my journey across the country. I sank into my chair with a huge sigh of relief. "What happened?" the English girls asked. I told them that the wind had blown my ticket out of my pocket as I was sitting by the door, and that I freaked out until I remembered that we actually had an extra ticket because the man at the station gave us three - for no apparent reason, until now.

"You know what that is? That's God looking after you," one of the girls said. I smiled at her. "Yeah. It is, isn't it?"
11:38 pm