Chloe Rattray

A week feels like a year when you__e seventeen and in love. A twenty minute drive might as well be an ocean. But we were together again and the whole world was rejoicing, even the gravel crunched melodiously under our feet as we danced onward through the night.

It all comes down to this: when you recognise your loneliness in another person, when you see desperation so familiar to yours written across someone else, you can__ just let them leave.

I wanted to tell him then how loneliness can become a tangible thing, after a while. It__ something that you carry with you on your shoulder, hold up like a friend with a twisted ankle. It sits with you and walks the streets with you. It__ a selfish thing and it refuses to let go or even split its attention. Of course, like a particularly annoying itch, you can convince yourself for a while that it__ not there. You can go to libraries and sit with friends and drink more coffee than your body can handle and you can feel surrounded and happy. But eventually you have to scratch it. Loneliness steals you away from the world, as if you__e been cut loose and you__e lost, untethered, somewhere far above everyone else. Just you and this feeling that you just need someone to put a hand on your shoulder and turn you around, to look at you and tell you the three words that matter most: You__e not alone. Don__ be scared. I am here. It__ not about love or lust or any other inadequate word; it__ about being touched and realising that you are no longer by yourself.

In the end, there wasn__ a right thing to say, only a right thing to do. So I sat further up on the bed and put my hand on Manuelle__ cheek and our mouths did the rest, finding each other even though our eyes were closed. I ceased to care about anything that wasn__ her body or mine as we wrapped ourselves around each other on the flower patterned quilt and I was closer to her than I__ ever been before. It wasn__ that we left therest of the world behind; it was the opposite. I could feel the world turning underneath us, I could hear birds outside and people laughing, and I felt that I waspart of it at last. With no part of my skin not touching Manuelle__, I was part of the world at last. Or maybe I__ romanticizing, and we were just two kids doing everything two kids can do in a cramped room at the back of a caravan.

This is just the way life is _ sometimes cruel, sometimes beautiful, all the time confusing and frightening and exhilarating _ and we just have to deal with it. That__what freedom is.

Every person comes with a place. It can be a house, a park, a building. When you meet someone, you are unknowingly meeting a place, a two-for-one deal that neither party is really aware of yet. Regular Joe__ is Marcus_ place. Mine is the library, second floor, nonfiction, the table between the Poker aisle and European History. Two-thousand days of friendship means that we share.

When you meet an extraordinary person, it__ like they get inside you, under your ribs, and shuffle everything inside you around until they find space for greatness to grow. But extraordinary people always get away. And when they leave, they take that little part of you with them. Suddenly you find yourself with a gap in your chest that you don__ know how to live with. Suddenly you__e frightened of being yourself without them.

People aren__ always what you want them to be. Sometimes they disappoint you or let you down, but you have to give them a chance first. You can__ just meet someone and expect them to be everything you__e looking for and then be angry when they__e not every hope and aspiration you projected onto them. It__ foolish to believe that someone will be what you imagine them to be. And sometimes, when you give them a chance, they turn out to be better than you imagined. Different, but better.