It was always you

Preface

Do we all, any of us, ever get a happy ending?

A wise scholar somewhere might ask, if endings, in their very nature can even be happy.

For when you mark the finish line to anything, that very milestone is nostalgic enough to cut through a person. Add in the inevitable shears that tear through bonds and people courtesy of said milestone and the nature of all endings inevitably becomes morose, bitter, no matter how much you might to it or over it.

However, before we get to the end, we must start at the beginning.

And as beginnings go, this one was as innocuous as it could be.

Tedious, slow, lazy in its set up-trapping me in a sense of ease before...

And there I go, getting ahead of myself again.

So, before I digress for the thousandth time, let me take you to the very start.

Not of everything, but of this story.

And that start lies somewhere in the middle of a foggy morning of a chilly October. The day off to as humdrum a start as I had learned to expect from my routine as a freshman student in Gilraen College of Arts and Sciences.

A rushed breakfast, an almost missed train, and with seconds to spare I made it to my first class.

Lost in the monotony of my routine, cribbing over college not amounting to anything I'd dreamed of even as I trudged from class to class, lecture to lecture, focused internally as I ever have known to be... I missed all the signs.

Like the three magpies that I kept seeing, or the way the sun shone with a little more hope than usual that day, fighting through the wintery fog to give much needed warmth. 

Like how the coffee that morning was just the way I liked it and my outfit for once was nicely put together. Like how there had been a ladybug on my friend's hand while we sat in the grounds pulling at grass and how during that break filled with laughter and joy I'd all but stumbled upon a four leaved clover.

All signs I looked over that morning, but all that I would soon cling to tightly-with awe, with hope, with desperation.

Just as later, much later, I would overthink all the other signs too. The not so good, not so hopeful ones.

Like the way my coffee had ended up spilling before I had had enough to wake me up after an all nighter.

How the magpies had gone from three to one, how the noon had been far from warm and edged with a saddening grey. 

How every possible black cat had crossed my path that morning. And the lucky penny I had found on the floor had been a fake.

Either ways, on that particular morning my head was too caught in classes, routine and numbers to spare any time to take in the signs.

I did wonder, still do, if I was paying attention, would this story have gone another way?

Had I read the foretelling correct, would I have run the other way or let myself live through what was coming towards me? But then again, which foretelling even would have been the 'correct' one? 

The one that urged me on? Or the one that told me to turn away and run?

You might laugh at my naive wonderings and tell me that fate is merciful to none, and none can escape it's spiked grasp.

Others of you might, by the end of this story, have an answer to the above question. Maybe we could have teams on both sides and run a vote.

Running away vs staying and facing fate at its most beautiful, most cruel.

A fun competition, if it didn't come at the price of my own pain. Yet still, I will not hold it against you-whichever way you choose.

But choose not before the end. The true end. You will know it when you come across it.

And till then, I will try to be impartial in telling my story so that your decision is the least biased.

Or as without bias as can be based on hearing another's story from their own mouth.

I hope though, one last hope before I bring you back to that morning, that...you stay kind in your judgements. For remember, this story begins when I was eighteen. An age of maturity for me from where I stood, but now almost a decade later I see it all differently. 

And in all those differences biggest was this: whatever my opinions back then of myself, I was too childish and immature. That grants me a little forgiveness for myself.

I hope it allows you to do so too.

And in that, for you to form your opinions, I feel it is time. 

Let us go back then, to the morning that marked both a beginning and an end.

The morning on which nothing earth shattering happened and yet it left my life changed forever.

One call, two faces, three names.

That morphed into ten, to infinity, and then one again.

Hello, I am Natasha, and this is my story.