Hello Stranger

by Jade West

The glass is always half full in my world, even when there’s no water left to drink. After all, you still have the glass there ready for some more…

Reading time was the only time I ever truly allowed myself. The only time I slipped out of my own world into someone else’s and left the heaviness of mine behind. My only escape.

I hovered in the doorway, watching Mum’s pale moonlit petals falling right in front of my eyes. So soft, but so firm. There were hardly any left, and I knew it. She knew it, too. “Sweet dreams,” I said.

“You’d better find life in my death,” she told me. “I mean it, Logan. You need to live.”

this wasn’t just me being a crazy girl with crazy dreams, going crazy over a man I didn’t know. Because if I wasn’t supposed to know him, I wouldn’t be walking into a life with him in it every single day, right through the day.

My freckles, and scars, and my imbalances. My wonky toes and my duck feet, and the way my thighs are too big against my skinny calves, and how my birthmarks make my tits look weird.

But even then, with my scars and weaknesses piling up high, I couldn’t hold back that tiny pinprick of light in the darkness. Because I’d seen it. His tiny pinprick of light in the darkness as he looked at me. That tiny little glimmer in his eyes as they held true on mine. And I knew it. I felt it... Please, universe, please let it be true.

My eyes met his and they held, fixing hard, even through the tears. His eyes held right back. Fixing hard. So hard and so steady. And more. There was more. Everything stopped. Right then in that moment, everything stopped. There was barely a breath moving in either of us as his arms reached out and pulled me close. I folded into him, pressing tight, and it was there. Just as I’d dreamed it would be. Just as I’d asked for, but better. Better than I’d ever believed it could be as he held my body close to his.

He kissed me back. His lips were warm, like the rest of him. Firm, like the rest of him. His chest was as solid as I remembered, his arms just as welcoming and calm. Until the kiss deepened and our mouths opened and his tongue met with mine. Until that calm turned to fire, and fire turned to want, and want turned to need. I needed him. I needed him like I needed breath. Because he was life. Touching him was life to me.

“Give yourself up to me,”

“Feel whatever you feel, just let yourself feel it.”

“I barely know her. She’s a girl I met on the train that I now work with. She’s barely more than half my age, and the only thing I know we have in common is that we like reading. That’s it. The sum total of how compatible we are.”

“This is where it counts. Not how compatible you are. Not where you met her. None of that crap. What matters is here. In the heart.”

“Never stop believing in it,”

“No matter what people think, never stop believing in it. I never have. It’s where your heart sings loudest, when that belief in the world comes true.”

“Never lose your eternal optimism for my sake, Chloe. Run away long before you lose yourself to my negativity.”

The shadows will always be waiting in the shadows.”

The moment is now, Chloe. It’s always now. Not about reliving the past or dreaming up the future, it’s in the here and now. Enjoy as many of those moments as you can, because they never come twice, my love.

She was alive. She was wild. She was free.

It doesn’t matter how many times you see people preparing at the end of life’s road, nothing prepares you for the slam of watching someone you love slip away.

I loved Jackie. I loved the man grieving alongside her. I loved our life together, all three of us here together and enjoying every minute.

“All the miniscule things have huge power. It’s the tiny things that we need to appreciate, all day, every day. And if things go crap and need sorting, they need sorting. No looking back and dwelling on the past. No blaming things for what’s happened. You just do it. Done. Dusted. Move on.”

“Don’t ever justify what makes you, you, or how good you are. You don’t have to stand up and be counted for shit that doesn’t matter. You want to eat a feast, you fucking eat one. You don’t have to justify how much or how little is on your plate, darling. Not ever. None of it ever matters – we are all as equally as important as the next person. There is no top dog, just the stupid damn illusion of one.”

what is it you want to be remembered for? What do you want your final part of the road to mean?

His hands held mine up high, and his eyes were pleading with me and eating me up at the same time. All I had to do was dive in.

All hellos ultimately have their goodbyes. And all goodbyes hurt so much harder if the love they are founded on is so damn strong. Still, all hellos with people you love are worth it. They are all worth their weight in gold.

Goodbye, my beautiful stranger. Goodbye, my beautiful Dr Hall.