Never As It Seems

Epilogue

"Nothing is ever as it seems.

When you look at your life you think you know and understand what you feel and why. You think you have a plan of what you are doing with your life and why you are going to do it. But sometimes, something may happen that will cause you to stop and look a little deeper. It might be a major event or just a quiet moment of contemplation and you realise that there are reasons you do the things you do and feel the things you feel.

When you look at other people, you automatically think you know where they are at. What makes them tick. Why they act the way they do. But there is always one factor more. Always something going on behind the scenes in that life that you may never know about.

Before you act, be inquisitive. Practise first in your own life. When you walk into a room and feel intimidated by the people in it, ask yourself why? Why does a particular person irritate you more than others? And then look at those around you. Think about their life while you are interacting with them. Remind yourself that they have been through things that you never have and never will."

Amber switched off the podcast and pulled the earphones from her ears. She had been distracted in her Counselling lectures that week, unable to shake today from her mind. How apt, she thought that she had re-listened to this particular one now, whilst waiting outside the vast concrete maze that had held her fiance for two years and seven months. As she leaned her back against a wall across the street from the door from which she had been told he would emerge, she recalled the time when she thought she had her life all together. She laughed at her eighteen year old self, the one that had declared she would not appear in public with her family any more. The girl who had fought against her mother at every opportunity because she was so adamant that she wanted to be who she wanted to be. And yet looking back, she had no idea who she was or who she wanted to be.

Things couldn't be more different now and it had all started with Jay. If she hadn't have met him she knew she would have drifted through the last few years aimlessly. She had already taken a year away from study, which without Jay's encouragement, would have been wasted with T.V. shows and visits to the Mall. Instead she went to Africa for three months. She volunteered in a Mother and Baby unit as well as helping in a school for ex child soldiers. She returned home even more resolved that her purpose in life was to help those who were hurting. When she got back, she got a job in a care home for the elderly, where she would be reprimanded regularly for spending too long chatting to the residents. She loved it though and never tired of their stories and the way their eyes lit up when they told her of mischievous things they hand done when they were children or of how they fell in love. She would cry sometimes too when she saw the frustration and sadness in the eyes of a once active and adventurous soul, who could no longer move or remember things well.

She also spent some wonderful time with her mother, mostly involving tea and cake and wedding magazines that she knew Jay would cringe at if he saw.

She turned her thoughts to Jay and her stomach flipped. She had been so nervous in the week leading up to his release and now the time was here, she thought she might explode. It wasn't that she hadn't seen him. She had visited when she could but a conversation across the table of a prison visiting room, with twenty other people in the same boat around you wasn't quite the same as real life, out here, together again. She wasn't sure if she could remember how to do that! She wondered how Jay would be affected by his time in prison. This was not a new thought and her conclusion had always been that however he was, it had to be better for him to have no secrets anymore and to have dealt with the stigma of his past. She knew it would be an ongoing process but one she was looking forward to going through with him.

She smiled to herself and as the April sun warmed her face, she replaced her earphones and her lecturer continued...  

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Author's Note:

Thank you soooo much for reading!  New story coming really soon! :)