It grows, doesn’t it, a friendship. First, it is just a click, mutual, a connection, when it isn’t even looked for, a surprise, on a street, in a doorway, at an event, on a station platform, on a country walk. I’ve heard of liftetime stories which began thus. It smiles me, and I know it happens, such a friendship, as it has happened to me. Love at first sight is real, or so I am told, and I want to believe it – across a crowded room, etcetera. I have’t experienced that, but I do know the ‘click’, the sudden connection and the unwillingness to move on, to move away. I want to stay, to talk, to ask questions, to hear his or her story. Occasionally that has been possible, but mostly not, even as that face, that person may intrigue me, remain in my thoughtful wonderings for weeks, months, even years. I wonder what happened to her, to him, to them, and all of that creates a fiddlehead in my own mind, a swirl of unanswered questions with a backdrop of warmth and smiles. Is the power of these encounters, I wonder, because so many people don’t smile, don’t catch another’s eye, don’t dare to stop, let alone talk awhile, and when just one does, the whole world stops spinning for the split of a second, a moment, leaving their colour, voice, story, hover above us, leave us longing for the share? Perhaps.

I can connect anywhere. I am the smiler, the eyes searching for other’s eyes. I am she. It isn’t that I am needy, no flipping way (I really run from ‘needy’ unless I sense authenticity in that need), but, instead, because I sincerely believe that we are fast losing the strength in humanunity, on the street, in a bus shelter, on a platform, in a doorway. Actually, that’s not the whole truth. I am just friendly. I love to connect with anyone, and anywhere. However, and I have learned this, that, even when a friendship grows, something can change. I’ve thought about that, a lot, as I knit a blanket for a new island baby, or wander among sandpipers, oystercatchers, primroses, violets and wood anemone, the latter bursting out from drystone walls, grassy banks, even slap in the middle of the earthen track, which twiddles its way up and into the Fairy Woods. I have thought, a lot.

What changes is not cataclysmic. It is, more, a tiny shift, like, as I imagine it, a movement of plates deep down, miles down, beneath an ocean surface. Cataclysmic at source, but resulting in a tiny crack nearer the surface, a lift of tidal flow, an argument of salt water, a pause in cloud talk. It is, or will be eventually, all encompassing, a big gasp, but it doesn’t begin that way. It begins with a turn of the head, a question rising straight, then curling into a fiddlehead, enscrolling text or score as yet unknown, unread, as if all the usual has run clean away. Confusion.

I understand this now. I remember changing when my first son burst into life. I remember how I no longer held his father first in my love-list. I remember the tectonic shift, deep in the depths of our marriage, the tiny crack, the lift of tidal flow, the argument of salt water, the pause in cloud talk. I don’t think I am alone in this change. I also recall times when I put my children first, lead the team, watched ‘beforefriends’ melt into the shadows. I know I stood for a principle and found yet another ‘friend’ slip away. I don’t miss any of them, even if it hurt, the rejection, at the time. I think, only slightly, of those whose power and greed have bought them ‘friends’, and I know that world, I spent time in it as a teen. How lonely they must, eventually be.

To move on in life, to stick to the moving on thing, which, btw, can feel so dam tough at times, and, I know that, to do this moving on thing takes guts. I salute you all, if you find yourself hesitating and doubting, because it is so much ‘short-term’ easier to be whom others want you to be, and just for their own sense of peace, it is not you.

It is not you.

I can sit back now, in the late sunshine, with a view to captivate (I will never say the other thing), with a glass of good red and remember my difficult choices, the times I rose like Boudicca, and the times I drowned like Ophelia, and the in-between Cowed Woman who did nothing at all, but just hid in the shadowdark. We are all many people inside just one person. We change, shift, lift, fall, cry, hide, rise, pretend, come clean, like oceans, like clouds. I don’t know if we ‘find ourselves’ eventually, but I can say that having the guts to search for self, and the finding of friends on the way, is, well, fascinating.