When I Met the Doctor
I was young, in the realm of things, and naïve, but I never would have believed you had you told me. I was new to the world of being an adult, and the world was mine for the taking. I had every plan to take it. My life was perfect, I was pretty smart, and had a loving and caring family in the mother and grandmother. Nothing could have gone wrong. That was until my mother died. I knew she was going, we all did: grandma, mother, and I. I grew up to stories that great-grandpa and then grandma told me, stories about my mother when she was young, not long before I came into her life. These stories, though, I was told I could never share with her. They would have killed her. Grandmother explained it to me one night, after she caught me trying to tell my mother the story. She explained how my mother had saved the universe and become the most brilliant woman on earth, only to have to give it all up to live. It made me so sad that she had had so much, and had to leave it. I wanted to hold her and cry for her, cry with her. I was 10 at the time, and I did cry, just not with her.
The stories though, were happy ones. They were stories of how she saved the world, along with her Doctor. Of how she had seen ancient times, met famous people, and saved many lives. I was so proud of her. As soon as I was old enough, I wrote the stories I'd been told down, so that I would always have them with me. They weren't perfect, with many mistakes and corrections, but they were mine. I wished, more than anything, to be able to hear the stories from her. To hear everything as it should be heard, as it had happened. I loved my mother, and I always will.
My wish actually did come true, she remembered, and for one brilliant month she was amazing, she glittered from within in a way I'd never seen before. She was so happy, so confident. But we all knew that it wouldn't last, that it couldn't. We knew it would kill her. She knew. It wasn't more than a week before the episodes started. They didn't last long, only a minute or two, but during them it was like her brain was giving up on her. That's when I started really taking down the stories and spending more time with her; I spent all the time I could with her. She took a month off of work, and we travelled. We went all over the world and she told us about all the fabulous things she'd seen and done. The episodes kept getting worse and worse with every passing one. The more she remembered, the worse they got. We'd just gotten back from Italy when it happened. She'd had one of her episodes, worse than ever before and lasting a full minute, and went down for a nap. She died with a smile on her face. I just knew she was remembering her adventures with The Doctor. Her Doctor.
I finally got to meet this man, the man who changed my mother: the man who helped her. He showed her that she was an amazing woman. That she mattered. Because of The Doctor, she felt confident that she could raise me, and love me, even if she didn't know where this knowledge came from.
He came to her funeral. Neither my Grandmother nor I knew how he found out, but he was there. Right away I knew who the man in the bow tie was, even if he didn't look anything like how my mother had described him, at least not physically. But there is no way to hide that kind of knowledge, not when you knew what it looked like. My mother's eyes had looked the same in Italy, that's why we came home.
I treated him like any other person that day. I shook his hand, smiled at him, and said hello. He only blinked when I called him The Doctor and smiled. He was the only one to receive a genuine smile. The whole afternoon he sat in the corner and just watched, he especially watched my Grandmother and I. He stayed there, in his private corner, until I went up to say my part. I could feel his eyes on me, and I forced myself to show an outward calm I didn't feel. I had to do this for her. She would have wanted her story shared.