Hello Stranger

Her mirror of me was perfection, the power in her eyes worthy of a crown.

“This isn’t about your mother,” she said. “It’s about me.”52ChloeSo many answers to so many questions in one tiny explanation, the puzzle was complete and crystal clear.

Logan was dying. Slowly, quickly, made no difference, it was concrete sense all round.

Fuck you, universe. Fuck you.

I didn’t hold back my words, not even for a second. I didn’t even begin to back away from him with his crazy crap expectations of have a nice day, I don’t want to know you anymore.

“I mean it,” I said to him. “You’re an inspiration, and I love you, and an ocean of love and happiness with you can be as short a crossing as it likes, it doesn’t mean it’s any less important, or any less valuable. If anything it makes it more valuable. In some ways it makes every single moment more important.”

“You’re out of your mind,” he replied. “You’re young and have a whole lifetime ahead of you.”

I shrugged my usual shrug. “And I might get knocked down by a bloody bus tomorrow, who knows?”

“You won’t be saying that when I’m rasping for breath, all tubed up like my mother, and you’re wiping my ass in your twenties while your friends are out there boogieing on the dancefloor every night.”

“Would you have sacrificed a single minute with your mum, even when she was at the end? Would you have rather been out somewhere else? Anywhere in the world doing anything you liked?”

He paused then. Stopped in his tracks.

“No.”

“Then what makes you think I would either, if we get to that point with you?”

“If?”

“Yeah,” I said. “If. Nothing in this life is certain.”

I heard Granny Weobley’s voice, giving me one of her wise old lessons, and I said it aloud.

“The moment is now. 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.”

“Lovely little mantra, where did you get that from?”

“My grandma,” I told him.

“Good for her.”

I looked at his face, at his scowl, at his gritted jaw and the darkness of the pain in his eyes. But there was more. Just a hint, but I could see it. Feel it.

I was reaching him. Some part of me was reaching some part of him, and somewhere there was a tiny little sparkle of brightness in his darkness, all that way deep inside him, he was reaching right back out at me.

He just didn’t know it.

He wouldn’t let himself know it.

“How many people have you lost?” I asked him. “In your life, I mean.”

“Too many,” he snapped.

“And how many of them would you regret spending a single second with?”

“Stop this,” he said. “You can’t reason with me.”

Reason, he used the word reason.

“If this was the other way around, and I got hit by that bus tomorrow and ended up in Franklin Ward on my way out, tubed up to the oxygen machine while my organs packed up, would you walk away from me with a see you later? Hey? Would you?”

“Of course not,” he snipped back. “But this is different.”

Different. Different. Different.

Everything was always so damn different. Except it wasn’t. It was exactly the same.

We loved each other.

Call it fate or destiny or coincidence, or two people having more in common than they could ever know possible, mixed with things on total opposite sides of the scales, like weird magnets that couldn’t stay apart… it didn’t make any difference whatsoever.

We loved each other.

And that wasn’t going anywhere. Ever.

I got up from the bed and walked up to him in his dressing gown, still naked, and tear streaked, with my heart absolutely reeling in pain… but my feet didn’t stall for a second. I walked right up to him and put my hands flat on his chest.

“One tiny second of joy is worth a lifetime without it,” I said. “I want every single second with you I can get. Every single second, of every single day.”

“You’re out of your mind,” he said, but his voice was buckling. “We have no fucking idea just how many seconds I’ve got left.”

“So let’s find out,” I told him, and remembered his words to me weeks ago. “Let’s just enjoy one day at a time, shall we? The shadows will always be waiting in the shadows.”

“That’s my line.”

“I pinched it.” I managed a smile. “I love you, Logan. I can say it a million times, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll keep on loving you.”

He laughed, just a little, but he laughed. “I’ve heard that line plenty of times with your pretty little ass in my patient’s seat.”

“You’ll hear it plenty more,” I laughed back. “So how about you let that fatality go for just a minute, hey, and let us enjoy one day at a time?”