Happy new year everyone!

I had this random idea and I just couldn't get it out of my mind, so I wrote it. It's just Meredith rambling inside her head about love. All kinds of love.

I hope you like it.

There are moments in life that we just can't seem to forget.

There are, of course, the big moments, the ones which we know will be important and represent the big changes in life.

First day of school, first time you ride a bike, first kiss, first time you have sex, high school graduation, college graduation, med school graduation, wedding, first child and I could go on and on.

These are moments we eagerly wait and get ready for.

But there are some other moments. Moments we don't know are coming and catch us by surprise. And it is mainly these moments the ones that make us who we are and shape what our life will be like.

It's one of those moments that has kept me awake for many nights in my life since I was in the fifth grade.

At eleven years old, God knows I had lived through so much more than the rest of the kids my age, but I'd still managed to keep some of that naïvite that sometimes make us wish we were still children. I still wanted to be a princess, still wanted to find my knight in shiny armour and my only worries in life still were where had I put my favorite shoes or whether I had enough money to buy strawberry ice cream on the way home from school. I still hoped my dad would be back one day and I would get my happy ending. Life was simple.

But then something changed. A kid in my class, Benjamin Reed, lost his mother to cancer. Doctors told her she was sick, gave her three months, fours days later she was paralyzed and unable to speak and a week later she was dead. Just like that.

So something clicked inside my brain. I realised life was short. Way too short. And I began wondering what's the purpose, what do we live for if we're all going to die in the end.

It may sound like a stupid question now, but when you're first starting to realise you're not going to live forever and that, if you're lucky, you just have about 60 to 70 years left to make things right you suddenly feel very small and irrelevant and you can feel an overwhelming anguish taking over.

So for days I cried myself to sleep trying to figure it out. I needed to ask someone else about it. I couldn't go to my mom, she surely didn't have an answer for that, so I went to Mrs. Langley.

Mrs. Langley was my arts teacher. She was a woman that had been a hippie in her young days, but had been dragged into the modern world, had got married and worked as a part-time arts teacher at my school. For some reason I always felt she was easy to talk to, she was nice, funny and open to any questions curious kids had.

I remember her clearly. Her big green eyes that some days were blue, her short, blond, curly hair that seemed to have a life of its own, her long, colorful and crazy outfits that made her look like she was floating all day long. And her smile, that big, warm smile.

So one day I asked her. I went to her after class and rambled my way into the question.

"It's just, I know it's stupid, I know...and probably everyone else knows this, but I don't...I don't know and I...I need to know. Because there has to be something, right? This can't be because of nothing, right? But, what if we run out of time? Then it wasn't worth it, what if we don't get to do anything, what if-"

"Meredith," she had said softly, taking my hands between hers. "What's wrong, dear?"

"Life's short. Life's short and we're all gonna die some day, so...what's in it? I mean, what do we live for?" I had asked with tears in my eyes.

"Oh, honey, come here," she had said taking me into her arms as I started to cry harder. "It's not stupid, everybody has asked themselves the same thing at least once in their lives, you were just brave enough to make the question out loud," she had the most comforting voice I had ever heard. "It's not stupid, ok?" I nodded and waited for her to answer my question.

She grabbed my shoulders and sat down on the desk behind her to be at eye level with me.

"It's love, honey. We live to love and to be loved by other people. Friendly love, family love, boy love. Because there is no better feeling, is there," she had said smiling, hugged me one more time and then sent me to wash my face before the next class began.

At first I was pretty satisfied with her answer. It seemed reasonable. Love felt good. The princess wanted love, found it in her knight in shiny armour and lived happily ever after. It happened all the time in the movies, so yeah, she must've been right.

But after a while I realised there was something wrong with that. Because not everyone had love in their lives, did they? Did that mean their lives weren't worth it?

The fact was, I wasn't sure I had love in my life. Maybe my mom loved me, but if she did she had one hell of a way of showing it. My dad had left me, so he couldn't possibly love me. I had a few friends in school, but no one I could say I actually loved. And that was it. There was no one else.

But that couldn't be right, could it? So I convinced myself that it would come. Love would come, it just took longer for some people.

When I grew up I pushed the thought to the back of my mind. It was a stupid thought anyway. So I just stopped asking myself why and just tried to make it through.

But every now an then, mostly at nights, it popped into my head and wouldn't let me sleep. Some nights I would go over every person I knew, one by one, trying to figure out whether I loved them or not.

In high school things hadn't changed much. I had some friends, met some guys, had sex with some of them, but I really never loved any of them. My mom was still my mom.

In college I met Sadie. She was my first real friend. We had fun together and for a long time she was like a sister to me. So maybe I loved her.

But the truth was I was drunk for the half of it, so what did I really know? Besides, afterwards we grew apart and it really didn't hurt much, so it probably wasn't love.

After that I went into med school and besides the occasional guy that wouldn't last over a month, I didn't have many relationships with people. I felt like my mother had been feeling kind of proud of me lately so I wasn't going to throw that away just to make friends. Besides, pride maybe meant my mom actually loved me.

My conversation with Mrs. Langley hadn't popped into my thoughts for years when I started my internship at Seattle Grace. I had been too busy to worry about that anyway.

But after my first day at the hospital I suddenly found myself thinking about it. Maybe I had found my person.

I had done a stupid thing that day. Well, many stupid things, for starters I had slept with my boss and then thrown him out of my house the next morning, but that had nothing to do with it.

I had been a jerk to Cristina that day. I had promised her the surgery and then I wasn't brave enough to let her have it. I chickened out.

I thought she was going to hate me. I thought I had just made my first enemy at work.

But then, after the surgery, she came to me. She came to me and I knew.

"We don't have to do that thing, where you know, I say something, then you say something, and somebody cries, and there's like a moment..."

So, yeah, suddenly I had a friend.

After a few weeks I not only had one friend, but four, I had four new friends who were quickly becoming the family I never had, who made me feel more comfortable than I ever had in my own house and who made each day at the hospital easier to get by.

When George died I felt some part of me had gone with him. It hurt like hell. I loved him.

After a few months of having started working at the hospital I had found another kind of love. Not only friendly love or friendly-family love, but love-love. Boy-love, as Mrs. Langley had called it. Sure, we had our ups and downs. There was Addison. And Finn. And Rose. Susan dying, my mom dying. The drowning. The running to the woods.

But the loving him never stopped. It has never stopped.

After a few years I met family. Actual, blood-related family. It was hard at first. No one likes to have a constant reminder of your miserable childhood walking around the place where you work. But in the end I gave in. She was too nice. So then I found blood-related-family love.

So yeah, my conversation with Mrs. Langley is one of those moments that has kept me awake for many nights in my life since I was in the fifth grade.

At first it had the potential to destroy me if I thought about it too much, so I avoided it.

But not tonight. Tonight I'm just happy and thinking about how much I'd like to thank her.

Because I've found friendly love. Even more than that, really.

And family love. Even when I had given up on it.

And boy love. I feel like I'm back in the fifth grade and I have finally found my knight in shiny whatever.

And another kind of love. One kind of love she forgot to mention, but I'm pretty sure will be the biggest and most breathtaking kind of all.

Suddenly there's a noise and he opens the door.

"Hey," he smiles at me.

"Hey".

"What are you doing up? You have to work in a few hours."

"I couldn't sleep," I say snuggling closer to him as he lies down next to me and puts an arms around my shoulders.

"Is everything OK?" He asks with worry putting a hand on my cheek encouraging me to look up at him.

"We're having a baby." I state simply.

"We are?"

"We are."

He smiles broadly and kisses me softly.

"I love you."

"Me too."

Because there is no better feeling, is there.

I'd love to know what you think. Please review!

Thank you.