Stories, they tell you in school, are supposed to have a beginning, a middle and an end. They start somewhere, and build, and then stop. But that's not how they work, not really. I mean, take us, our story, for an example. Where does it start? When I met you, when you saw me first? But we were already in the middle of our own stories, with pasts and motives and future plans. Beginning there, with no explanation, no background, would make the rest meaningless. If we took it back further, say to when we were born, we're still in the middle of an ongoing chapter in our parents' lives. What I'm trying to say, badly as usual, is that life isn't as simple as stories make out. Its messy, and nothing happens on its own. No man is an island, they say, and no woman is either. Everything that's already passed us affects us now, and sometimes the things that have happened to other people do too. Those things affect how they react, and how we react, and suddenly it all spirals out of control and we're no longer in charge of our own lives, not really. I guess I'm telling you, in my own roundabout way, that I understand. I understand why you had to leave, why you left me there crying in that hallway on my own.
I know perhaps you thought I wouldn't, or couldn't, understand the way the past weighs on a person, and affects their now, but I did. After all, as I say, no woman is an island, and I'm not either. I carry my own scars, deep within me, buried under many more recent layers, and you can't have that yourself and not understand other people's. I knew, even as you turned and left, that you were walking backwards, into the past, and that was not something you, or I, or anyone else, could help.
Of course, it's been many years now since Pearl Harbour. We've had good times, and bad times, and all the times in between. I know, now, that you won't leave me again; that our pasts and nows are two tightly tied for our futures to be separated. Often, at night, I lie there, awake as you sleep, and think about all the things we've survived. When, at those times, I look at your face, I can't see any trace of all that surviving. There's no lines of worry etched there, no creases in your forehead or around your eyes, no outward bruises or scars, although I know they're there, under the surface. Sometimes when you speak, I can hear them in the cracks in your voice. Over time, I've come to know when your past is bubbling close to the surface, the days when you worry you made the wrong choices, took the wrong paths, and those days I know my job is to be there, and hold you until the past retreats again into the past. But in the blue half-light, our faces and bodies only inches apart, when I look at you and can see nothing of our past, I wonder how much I really know you. I wonder how much anyone can know you, when there's so much hidden away, locked up safely in your heart, that is never allowed to the surface, that never seeps through the cracks in your voice. I know my own weaknesses, and I know how obvious I can be, how my face betrays my thoughts. At one time, I thought that I was a closed book, capable of hiding all my secrets tightly inside. I don't think I ever could, it was just that people weren't looking for them. It's amazing, I find, how little people actually see when they look at a person.
I'd never say this out loud, never actually tell you all this. You'd think I'd gone soft in the head, remember the other times I didn't make sense, couldn't finish sensible sentences, and worry there was something wrong, that you'd done something. You haven't, of course, I'm just trying to make sense of this story's unending middle. So that's why I'm here, sat on the bed, talking to that old, battered photo of you. I know you wanted me to get rid of it years ago, but I can't. It's from an earlier part of our middle, one which some might call our beginning. It's from when I first suspected we were might be in the middle of each other's stories, and not just our own. So come here, and forgive an old woman her follies, and let the story continue still.