Just Haven't Met You Yet

by Sophie Cousens

TIGER WOMAN ON FAILURE Tigers are expert hunters, yet only roughly one in twenty hunts ends in a kill. After an unsuccessful hunt, do tigers go home and lament how bad they are at hunting? Do they call their friends and wonder how they’ll ever eat again, because they are clearly such failures? They do not. They get back out there and try again.

“She was my best friend.” I am surprised at myself, that I have willingly brought Mum into this conversation. I would usually be too wary of the torrent of emotion, which I know flows so close beneath the surface.

“Someone once told me that growing up feeling loved allows you to go on to love other people. Maybe love is simply a huge chain letter, passed down through the generations. The details of the stories begin not to matter.”

I feel surer of myself when I am around her, and that is a valuable attribute for a friend to have.

“When you are with someone for a long time, you grow into each other, like adjoining trees with tangled roots. It’s hard to extricate yourself and find the part that’s left—who you were before.”

“Most of us will never be the best at anything we do. It isn’t a reason not to do it.”

“People like to fill in the gaps, to paint their own picture, but no one really knows the truth of someone else’s story.”