Their eyes met. It had begun. They had begun.

I was in love with the idea of him. An ideal of him. Of who I thought he was. Of who he used to be.

And so taking the long way home through the market I slow my pace down. It doesn't come naturally. My legs are programmed to trot briskly and my arms to pump up and down like pistons, but I force myself to stroll past the stalls and pavement cafes. To enjoy just being somewhere, rather than rushing from somewhere, to somewhere. Inhaling deep lungfuls of air, instead of my usual shallow breaths. I take a moment to just stop and look around me. And smile to myself. For the first time in a long time, I can, quite literally, smell the coffee.

If the worst is going to happen, it'll happen. Worrying can't protect you from that. And if it doesn't happen then you've missed out on all the time that when you could have been having fun

Missing someone has to be one of the worst human emotions. All the other feelings like anger and fear and horror get some much more airplay, as if their intensity gives them more value, but whereas those emotions come in violent bursts and are gone again, the gnawing ache of loss has to be simply endured. It's like background noise, it's always there, it never goes away. You just have to try to block it out, distract yourself, hope that tomorrow the hole they left behind has grown a little smaller.

For a split second they stared at each other. A fleeting, lasting moment. One person noticing another person out of a whole crowd of strangers.

Life isn't complicated. It's very simple, really. It's us who make it complicated.