At Least We Have Good Weather: A Life of Love and Loss

Chapter 33

Noelene, The Hot Train Girl, and I spent the rest of the afternoon trading email after email. The best part of getting to know someone, is exactly that: the getting-to-know-them part. I love learning about people, I love listening to their stories, collecting little pieces of information that they think are meaningless, but later on in life become so vital. Listening is the first rule of a relationship to me.

The hours passed until Noelene had to leave to catch the afternoon train home, I played it cool by not racing to the train station to catch the same train as her, so instead, I gave her my Blackberry messenger number and told her that when she was ready, she could add me.

Naturally cautious, she said she would think about it.

During our email chats I could tell that she had a mean self-defensive streak, clearly brought about by some hurt or betrayal in her life. I tried not to overdo it, as I have a tendency to do. I speak from the heart, and with the wrong person it can come off as too much.

She warned me about this in our email chats, even going as far as using the words I hate most "don't go and fall in love with me"...I replied to it with a typically courteous and charming response to which she overwhelmingly replied to with "oh my god, it might just be me who falls in love with you!"

Boom!

She sent me a picture over email, and the first thing I noticed was the great sadness in her eyes. It was same look that had attracted me to her so many months ago. But at least I now had a way of seeing her anytime I wanted to. She was beautiful. Her smile, which she said she hated, was my favourite thing about her...maybe because she used it so rarely, yet I managed to bring it out of her every time we saw each other.

A few minutes later she did indeed add me on chat, and what proceeded was the most amazing 8 hours ever. We chatted non-stop.

We spoke about anything and everything. The good, the bad and the uncomfortable. She kept warning me that if things got too weird, she would delete me. And more often than not my opinion of how we could have the perfect train romance story hit a nerve and she pulled back. Then within a few minutes she was telling me that if we ever did get married, and then divorced, I'd have to promise her just one thing...that I would leave her with kids who had my colour eyes. As a test I asked her what colour my eyes were, and she became the first person to ever get them right. Nobody had ever paid attention to the change in the colour of my eyes depending on my mood. If I wasn't smitten with her before...well I was now.

She told me about her exes, which included an ex-husband who wanted her back, and ex- boyfriend who sometimes waited for her at the train station, and, she also reminded me about a work colleague who didn't like me, as he thought my poems and letters were just pathetic.

I already had so many factors working against me, but I was prepared to try everything I could to make a go of things with the girl I had once only known as Hot Train Girl #2. And I told her as much.

Again she reiterated that I mustn't fall in love with her and get all weird on her. She was tired of the stalker rubbish in her life. I couldn't promise her that, but I did promise that IF I ever did fall in love with her, I would never fall out of love with her. I knew that to be true, if it was that real love I so desperately craved in my life, it would be forever.

By 2am the next day we both admitted we were exhausted. She had a work training function on later that day that she needed to get to early, and I was auditioning for the local version of the reality show, Survivor. I thought it worked out perfectly because we would at least have a bit of a break before speaking again.