"Learning to Love Again" by Natalie Walker

As this is a true story names have been changed.

A wise woman once told me that Life is a journey, and from time to time people travel with us on our journey, for seasons, reasons and lifetimes. Some people travel with us only for a short while, others travel with us for a long while and others travel with us for a lifetime, and all the while they are meant to teach us something. I had met the woman on a train journey across country when I was starting university in Southampton, she never gave me her name and I never saw her again, but the sentiment she gave me has stayed with me ever since.

But of course, at the time I had no idea of how significant the statement that she made would end up being to me, I was on my way to university to meet a whole bunch of new friends and I had a fiancé back home who loved me, or so I thought. Why should I care about seasons, reasons or lifetimes? I was twenty-one years old; I was young and vibrant and had my whole life ahead of me. I dismissed what she said at the time as her making polite conversation but I know now that she was an older and wiser woman trying to pass on her experience to someone who desperately needed it.

Three weeks before this train journey, my fiancé Jake had of course cheated on me and this was a classic case of me letting my heart rule my head. My head was telling me to dump him and that I could do better and my heart was of course screaming out at the top of its voice “Are you crazy, he loves you and you love him, he just made a mistake, forgive him”. I ignored my instinct and I listened to my heart, I tried to forgive him. I tried my hardest to forgive him and I wish now that I had chopped off his manhood when I had threatened to, because a week after I had left for university I called him and his family said he was outside talking to the girl he cheated on me with. “That’s a really great way to show his feelings for me, isn’t it?” I thought. Well that was it for me, for the first time in my life; my heart was in agreement with my head. It was over and done with. I dumped him right then and there and I haven’t seen him since. I don’t particularly want to. I could go into great detail about the man who broke my heart, but as interesting as that may seem, what is even more interesting is the man who brought my heart back to life.

Ironically he was called Jake, too. We met on October 16^th 2005, that day will forever be etched in my memory as the day I met the kindest, sweetest, and most gentle man I have ever known. It happened by chance, I had come home for the weekend to spend some time with my mum and my friends, it was a Sunday evening and I had planned to get the 7.15 train from Boston to Grantham where I had to connect, but I had gotten to the train station an hour early because I had taken a taxi, and the overcrowded 6.15 train had pulled onto the platform, I had a few bags with me and the carriage was cramped and sweaty, as is the norm for a train in peak time, but I spotted a seat and I asked politely if the gentleman sitting at the table seat with his daughter wouldn’t mind if I sat there. He was very courteous and said “No of course you can” and he proceeded to clear some space for me. The journey from Boston to Grantham takes about forty-five minutes, and we chatted away and played catch with the ball that his daughter had with her. I noticed his gorgeous blue eyes, they looked so lovingly at the little girl sat next to him and his smile was so cheeky when he looked at me, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if I could see this guy again. I was on the rebound; I wasn’t looking for anything serious. I thought to myself “Would it hurt to give this guy my email? I mean I can always block him if he turns out to be a psycho” so by the end of the journey when I was supposed to get off the train at Grantham I had written down my email address on a tiny scrap of paper and handed it to him.

In all honesty, I never expected him to use it, I thought that he would just throw it in the bin when he got off the train. I got off the train and I had a smile on my face for every single one of the nearly three hundred miles I had to travel. But I woke up the next morning, went to lectures and didn’t think any more of it. I didn’t think about him until a week later when a message popped up on my instant messaging program.

“Hi, we met on the train last week” the message read or something along those lines I can’t really remember. My heart was a flutter with the memory of his eyes and his smile, his laugh, his handsome jet black hair. I couldn’t believe that he had actually used my email address to find me on instant messenger, which wasn’t hard. But I was thinking what reason on earth could this guy possibly have for wanting to talk to me again? My memories of guys past who were all prize jerks were still ever present in my mind. I thought that I asked for everything I got, after all it was me that couldn’t see them for what they really were until it was too late, it was my own stupid fault and I deserved it. I know that is not the case now, I know that they just didn’t know how to treat women, but that was my opinion of myself, it was low. I couldn’t help how I felt. So with trepidation and anxiety I replied to the message, we got talking about things we liked and didn’t like, it turned out that we had a lot in common, we both loved science fiction and star trek, we could have an intelligent conversation without me having to explain what long words meant, I enjoyed having a conversation without having to stop and be teacher.

After a while I gave him my phone number and we would talk on the phone for hours, when his phone bill came it was huge, I offered to help him with it as it was partly my fault but he was gentlemanly and refused. After about a week of talking on the phone, I was in the cafe at Uni, using the wireless service and I was talking to a friend who just so happened to be a warden at the Hall of Residence I was staying in. She told me that a package had arrived for me; I was surprised because I wasn’t expecting anything. I wasn’t feeling well the night before and I was on the phone to Jake, he had asked for my address, he told me it was so he could send me a microphone so we could save on the phone calls, he had of course sent me the microphone and had also sent me a bouquet of six red roses. Roses just so happen to be my favourite flower.

Jake is the kind of guy that makes you want to go the extra mile, he is the kind of guy that little girls dream will be there night in shining armour; he is one of a kind. One particular Saturday Evening I was feeling pretty down with the pressures of University I called him and asked him if I could come up to Nottingham where he lived, he obliged and said he would meet me at the train station, it was a five hour journey and I arrived at Nottingham and he was there, wearing a lovely white tracksuit top and hair gelled back, he looked gorgeous, I’ll never forget the smell of his aftershave that night, I can sometimes still smell it today. It was quarter past one in the morning and there he was on the station waiting to meet me, deep down inside I couldn’t help but think that this was too good to be true, it was always too good to be true.

But of course this guy was the real deal, one of a rare breed that is only believed to exist in the world of fairytale and fantasy, the true gentlemen. I remember that night like it was yesterday, we sat up talking for hours on end, and he just held me next to him. Some of the closest moments I felt with him were moments when he said nothing and did nothing but hold me and look into my eyes with those gorgeous blue eyes of his. If you looked closely at his eyes you would see them change from the piercing blue that they normally were to a soothing steely grey. I sometimes felt as if his eyes could look into mine and see the truth of my soul, that is a powerful thing for a woman in the wrong man’s hand’s but this was a gentle, mild mannered man, though not without his faults and more than a few expletives in his vocabulary, he was generally quiet and gentle.

The first “proper date” that he took me on, he took me to a Spanish restaurant called La Tasca, we had a quiet table for two in the corner and I proved that I couldn’t handle my alcohol and was drunk after only two glasses of sangria, or so Jake claims, I still maintain that I had more than two, I ended up falling on to the bus home and singeing my hair while trying to light a cigarette, which incidentally wasn’t the first time and definitely wasn’t the last time I singed my hair while drunk, but Jake was always the gentleman. The restaurant became a favourite spot of ours and when I eventually moved to Nottingham after dropping out of University we went there on more than one occasion.

My first day at work at a new job, he knew that I would be tired and we had arranged to meet, I thought that we would be going out but he had decided to surprise me with a home cooked meal and a back massage, he could be so tender and romantic.

We kept seeing each other on and off until 2008 and I found it quite fitting that we said good bye to our relationship, the same way that we had said hello to it, on the move, we stayed friends and still speak to each other from time to time, I don’t think that I could ever love him the same way that I loved him when I first met him but he will always have a place in my heart and I would do anything for him if he were in trouble.

It was by chance that I met this man, had I not been early to the train station one evening in 2005, I may never have known the man that brought me so much happiness at a time when I needed it the most. Life can be very serendipitous, the key is to know when to take the chance and when not to, and thanks to one man in particular, my outlook on the world and my opinion of myself has changed dramatically.