Sometime last summer, when my loneliness seemed to reach astronomical heights, I met you. It was my first job, in a shop, and you were on holiday when I started and so it was a full two weeks until I met you. I saw you walk across the car park, your head bent, your earphones in, your worn leather boots clapping against the concrete. It sounds cliched, but from the very first Sunday we worked together, I knew that I really liked you. I didn’t love you yet – that came later, as my last day working with you approached.
I love your laugh and your smile. Just seeing you makes me happy and everything thing you say makes me feel warm inside. I always thought you were the most intelligent person I’ve ever met, and for that reason, the most wasted. You could have achieved so much and you knew it. You are incredibly well-read and have educated yourself because you were too rebellious for school. You speak French, despite having never been to France. You read Shakespeare for fun (you also read those appalling romance novels you can download for free on your Kindle but I won’t tell anyone that) and you hold firm, unwavering views that no one would dare attempt to challenge.
You’re not a self-conscious person, but I wish I could tell you how beautiful you are, just so you are aware; your skin, your grey hair, that odd haircut, the scar that mars your face from the operation you had in the 90s.
We’re so different, you and I.
You are tiny and I’m tall, you are confident and bold while I’m shy and anxious. But being with you makes me feel safe, and in all honesty, safety isn’t something I’ve felt very often, growing up in a household with a father who hits my mother and a mother who drinks to forget his fist. With you, I can be myself and just exist.
I’ve left to travel before university but what I wanted more than anything was to stay, just to be with you. You’re the only person in my life who makes me truly happy, who makes me feel valued, who makes me believe that one day, I will find someone I can love honestly and openly. When you hugged me goodbye, I wanted to hold you for ever. You’re not a very tactile person but you often slap me on the arm, rest your head on my shoulder as you laugh so hard you buckle over, hold my hand as I jump down from the shed roof out the back of the shop. My mother, on the other hand, acts as if my skin will burn her if she dares touch it.
The tragic thing about all of this is that I mean little to you. I am just another part-time colleague, a random teenage girl you knew for nine months then will forget about. You’re a middle-aged mother of two, a wife, someone whose job is just that – a job, nothing more.
I’ve accepted that you don’t like me as I like you, but I just wish I could tell you how much you mean to me, how you have given me hope for the future and something resembling real happiness for the first time. Although, in a sense, I’m glad you won’t miss me – I can’t bear the thought of you being in pain.
Anyway, I love you, J. I just wish I could have told you that.
Anonymous
