10-10-2002

 I've told this story before, but the pronouns are all wrong, so let's try it again. 

I was not in a good place. Years of untreated depression and undertreated anxiety, a problematic reliance on alcohol to get me through the day, and the latest in a series of highly inappropriate crushes, had led to me lying - not for the first time - on the seating in the maths department, bawling my eyes out.

I was definitely hoping someone would stop and comfort me. It just turned out not to be the person I was hoping it would be.

I'm pretty sure I didn't know who stopped and sat down on the floor next to me, but I knew who it wasn't so I didn't react, and just carried on crying until my tears dried up. I was curled up, face down, hair fallen over my face so I couldn't see them. I hoped they'd go away. I didn't want to talk to anyone new, I didn't want to try and explain. And so even after I stopped crying, I lay there for a while, trying to work up the courage to get up and leave. 

From her point of view, she just a saw a young woman in distress, and knew what that felt like. So she stopped, and waited. She didn't say anything. She just sat there: to see if I needed anything, to just be there. 

We were there sufficiently long that her leg started to cramp, and so she shifted position. I heared the movement, and risked glancing up. And so it was that the first words that my partner of seventeen and a half years said to me - the woman who I raised a child with, bought a house with, got a dog with, the woman who taught me how to cook chili and taught me how to play D&D - the very first words I ever heard her say, were "Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere."