Dinner is served

©Jennifer Pendergast

It was a dinner party I didn’t want to attend. But my friends pressed on. “Just put on a smile, as fake as it may be and come. At least you’ll eat well, it’s guaranteed,” they prompted.

I pushed myself to abide.

I had no expectations whatsoever.

And perhaps that was the best thing of all.

That was what made it so great.

Because he was there.

You don’t know it from the start, but all it takes is one person to change your life. To make you fall in love and to not remember how you lived without them.

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Life-changing flares

It takes courage to get up in the morning and convince yourself that today will be the day when something so wonderfully extraordinary happens that life will never be the same.

It takes guts to be so cheerful before you’ve barely opened your eyes.

Leo was one of those guys.

He was that person who sang as he shaved before going to work. Who made breakfast for the family on weekends. Who hardly complained about anything, because ‘what good would that do?’ He was the one who could literally turn your frown upside down because when you saw him, you wished there were more of him in the world.

Linda was a girl with mood swings. Like any female, she was easily affected by hormonal changes, to the extent that days of laughter would be preceded by spurs of inexplicable irritation or followed by moments of melancholic sobbing. There was no real explanation for any of it. She was, however, a person who would wear her heart on her sleeve; she would do anything she could and more to take care of the people she loved. She would organise surprises and be happier for the emotion felt rather than the gift itself. She was a person who would go all out, and despite what she said, she secretly hoped someone would do something similar for her too.

When they met, the flare lit up inside both instantly.

Leo asked her if she believed in fate. “What if everything we lived was precisely to lead us to this very moment, so that we could meet right here, right now?”

“What if we’re one connection away from changing our entire lives?” was her response.

She smiled and his entire world lit up. His heart fluttered and she blushed, her eyes glistening with happiness.

It wasn’t always easy. But they tried. Together. It required finding the middle line. Making compromises and retreating when fighting would not lead anywhere.

“I need you to be happy, because we can’t be sad together,” he told her when she felt blue.

“If you laugh, I’ll smile,” she would reply.

And step-by-step they would make each other better.

In life we don’t need extravagance; just one person to turn on the light. Everything else will follow.

Ripples of love

©Brenda Cox

There is a tingling sensation mixed with an adrenaline rush when you take a trip abroad with a partner. Particularly when the flirting is still young and everything is so sweet and fresh and delightful. There are so many things you want to do; so much you want to talk about; as if trying to make up for the time lost when you hadn’t yet met each other.

It was freezing cold at the square. You could feel it climbing inside and diffusing into every vein. But when he heard her laugh ripple, he needed nothing more to warm up.

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As dawn breaks

©Dale Rogerson

As dawn breaks beyond the spire, overwhelming the horizon with a mesmerizing honeycomb illusion, my thoughts wander towards you.

What would I give for you to be here, right next to me.

How many minutes would I spend speaking to your eyes without saying a word.

How many things we would experience together.

How many choices could we have made differently; but what if this was the right time to meet, and never before?

What if there is a reason life made our paths cross now?

As the sun rises, how many silences are filled with our kissing breaths intertwined…

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What rocked the boat

© Penny Gadd

“What’s the best memory you have of the trip?”

He pondered for a while, his eyes gazing away and suddenly sparkling. A smile timidly spread across his face.

“The boat ride across the river”.

He paused, breathed in the emotion and continued: “I didn’t think it would be anything mind-blowing, but I decided to go along anyway, given it was a must-do sightseeing. The water was far from clean, so we were all extra careful about potentially falling in”. He laughed.

“We saw an alligator crawl in a few metres away. But that wasn’t what changed me. It was she…”

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The magic within

“Isn’t it encouraging to consider that every minute of the day two people – seemingly strangers – are getting to know each other and are falling in love as their hands softly touch?”

“Do you really think that’s possible?”

“It’s nice to believe in something we can’t see. It’s refreshing to believe that magic still happens. We need that kind of optimism in our lives. That sort of positiveness is so lacking in this world we’ve created”.

They were sitting on a couch talking all night. Neither of them could sleep. It was those late night talks about random issues that brought them closer. It was those things you tell a person at your most vulnerable time that help you form a stronger bond with them. Those thoughts that spring to mind at the most awkward of hours; the concerns you have but haven’t even admitted to yourself; the debates you feel too silly to have with anyone else.

The magic happens when you least expect it. When you’re hardly prepared for it. When you’ve planned everything but that. When you truly are yourself, without shame, prejudices or fear of what others will think of you.

When you let yourself go and are proud of who you are, the magic will happen.

Because you’ve been carrying it within you all along.

You just haven’t realised it yet.

Inn of Hearts

“People choose to stay at an inn to escape reality.  So it should be a place where they feel welcome and comfortable. But it should also transfer them to somewhere else. A place that only exists in their dreams. Until they come here”.

It was how her grandmother described the inn she managed, ever since Hazel could remember.

Hazel, named so because of her distinctive brown-coloured eyes, spent most of her summers at her grandma’s inn in the New Zealand countryside.

It was a place that combined nature, green valleys, mountains and beautiful beaches. The summers there were memorable. She would always find something adventurous and exciting to do, be it from simple gardening to trekking, gliding and rock-diving, so that by the time she entered adulthood she was already saturated with experiences.

But then, her career-driven self got carried away by city life and the business routine that meant having a leave but never actually taking it, and working incessantly.

It was only after her grandma passed away and she inherited the inn she loved, that she returned to it after years of neglect.

From the minute she stepped back on the porch, Hazel could feel her grandmother’s presence and all her childhood memories rushing back. She could feel it all in the air around her.

She decided to renovate the inn to its former glory, fixing what was broken and treasuring what was worth saving, while using eco-friendly resources to give back to nature that had nourished her childhood so well.

And in this she had found help. As if sent along deliberately by a higher force to remind her of all that she had forgotten so abruptly growing up.

Roger was a man who returned to his roots when he discovered that fixing old things helped him restore the broken parts of his soul.

It was inevitable that they would fall in love.

The inn brought them together into constructing a dream home they never knew they shared.

They kept its former name: “The Inn of Hearts”.

Staying afloat

When you fall into a river you’re besieged with an innate instinct for survival and you search for ways to keep afloat and to get out. It’s natural. If you stop trying to swim, you’ll sink, and ultimately drown.

This is somewhat true in how you survive in your daily life as well. In the relationships you build and maintain. What holds you down is what makes you drown. And that can range from the negative thoughts in your head, your problems, your stress, the prejudices you carry around, even past traumatic experiences from failed relationships that have left a bitter aftertaste.

When you exit the river, you’re never the same person as the one who entered. Something has washed over you and infiltrated you even if you can’t see it. You’re changed by every experience you have, every person who walks in – and out – of your life. There is a lesson to be gained from everything. As long as we want to acknowledge it.

Seminars on self-help and self-growth are abundant. This was an excerpt from one of them. She was drawn into it because the metaphor was cunning. But, this was nothing new. Theories are so easy to develop. They’re easy to state, even to ourselves. Acting upon them is what is necessary and means something. And that is the hardest to do. Because accepting reality and that some things just happen, is the most difficult of all.

She would give herself completely in someone she felt was worthwhile. She would fall head over heels from the start. And perhaps that was her mistake. That she would put herself on offer willingly, without being asked. Her friend told her that this made the other person greedy, thus provoking his insatiable attitude. But she would do things because she wanted to and felt pleasure in doing them. Because happiness entails making others smile. Because we love the way we want to be loved. It’s the only way she knew.

But when things snapped in an instant for no rational reason, she was the one left heartbroken, wondering why others don’t treat her the same way she would. Why they wouldn’t run to surprise her and make things right. Why they wouldn’t even call to talk and solve the dispute that so abruptly and harshly erased their laughter.

They say “we accept the love we think we deserve”, but that’s not true. Because we don’t always attract what we want, but rather what we need at certain periods in time. We learn something out of every incident we face, regardless of how good or bad it is. We don’t always end up with what we crave. But sometimes we realise that maybe it’s for the best. Sometimes pain is meant to be felt, so we can appreciate serenity when it finally arrives.

A garden of surprise

©J Hardy Carroll

It was a strange place to go to get to know another person better. It was just their second encounter. Simon had promised a “surprise that would definitely be worth her time” if Harriet accepted to see him again. She blushed and accepted without thinking too much. Sometimes overthinking steals the joy of impulsive actions.

They spent almost the entire day at the botanical gardens. She had never been, but it was on her ‘to-do’ list. He had recently read about it.

It was there that they both discovered the importance of being blown away by someone’s mind and personality.

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Travelling stories to tell

When things got rough, they used to just leave. Together. They would travel to someplace new, to fill their hearts with adventure and their minds with enthrallment at how vast our world truly is. They believed that travelling – by car, motorbike, train, airplane, boat, whatever means available according to the destination – opened a person’s heart, broadened their minds and filled them with stories to tell. And they had many.

But lately, they became alienated from each other. And consequently from all the things they did together.

She was always excited when travelling with him, because he became almost a different person; someone more relaxed, more serious, yet thoughtful at the same time. He became the person she fell in love with. As if breaking the bonds that held him captive to his daily routine liberated him into becoming a better version of himself.

He loved travelling with her because it lit up a spark in her eyes; she let out a childish enthusiasm and reminded him all over why he fell in love with her in the first place.

Now, they travelled in different directions.

She went to places that were new to her, where they had never been before together.

He, on the contrary, went to all the same, where they had.

Because one wanted to forget. And the other to always remember.