Still Me (Me Before You #3)

by Jojo Moyes

“You gotta have your places for community.” Ashok raised a hand emphatically, slicing the air. “You gotta have places where people can meet and talk and exchange ideas and it not just be about money, you know? Books are what teach you about life. Books teach you empathy. But you can’t buy books if you barely got enough to make rent. So that library is a vital resource! You shut a library, Louisa, you don’t just shut down a building, you shut down hope.”

When we meet it’s like the volume’s turned up too high on everything. We can’t just relax with each other.

All my life I’ve ended up looking after other people, fitting myself around what they need, what they wanted. I’m good at it. I do it before I even realize what I’m doing. I’d probably do it to you too. You have no idea how much right now I want to book a flight and just be with you. But these last couple of months something has happened to me—something that stops me doing just that.

Once upon a time there was a small-town girl who lived in a small world. She was perfectly happy, or at least she told herself she was. Like many girls, she loved to try different looks, to be someone she wasn’t. But, like too many girls, life had chipped away at her until, instead of finding what truly suited her, she camouflaged herself, hid the bits that made her different. For a while she let the world bruise her until she decided it was safer not to be herself at all.

There are so many versions of ourselves we can choose to be. Once, my life was destined to be measured out in the most ordinary of steps. I learned differently from a man who refused to accept the version of himself he’d been left with, and an old lady who saw, conversely, that she could transform herself, right up to a point when many people would have said there was nothing left to be done. I had a choice. I was Louisa Clark from New York or Louisa Clark from Stortfold. Or there might be a whole other Louisa I hadn’t yet met. The key was making sure that anyone you allowed to walk beside you didn’t get to decide which you were, and pin you down like a butterfly in a case. The key was to know that you could always somehow find a way to reinvent yourself again.