A couple of weeks ago I was Stoke bound on the train back from London. Hungover, brain throbbing and eyes stinging from lack of sleep, I rested my forehead against the cool of the window and closed my eyes. A brief relief. As I sat I listened to the conversation of two men in their late 20’s. One of the men, Will, was talking about his recent breakup with a woman called Anna. I listened as he recalled in significant detail the difference in Anna from their very first date to the last time he saw her just a few weeks before.
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“One of the final things I said to Anna was that loving her had made me a better person.”

“She smiled” he continued; “that Anna smile…” he paused and I knew he was imagining her face in that moment.

“It dawned on me that that would probably be last time I would see her smile.”⁣
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I opened my eyes to see him drop his head, stare at his hands for a while, studying them as though he was seeing them for the first time. Focusing intently on a ragged cuticle perhaps. He looked up and out of the train window, the fields and trees rolling by. His jaw tense, swallowing slowly as he surprised emotions he clearly didn’t want to show in the presence of this friend on the 13:40 from London. Slowly his face softened into a smile as if remembering. Something.
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I spent the rest of my journey listening to stories about Anna. Watching Will animatedly talk about her through the two headrests in front of me. How once her computer was broken and so he would log in to her account and recite her unread emails to her over the phone. One, from a close friend of hers ended… ‘P.S I think you should marry Will. He’s very funny and he makes you happy.⁣’
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“And I had to read that out to her” he laughed “I’m not sure who was more embarrassed but I was suitably touched by the sentiment.”⁣
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I wondered what had happened between the two of them. What was it between that very first date and the last time he saw her, yet still he spoke so fondly of her?

Still he smiled when he thought of her. I hoped that one day someone would speak about me on a packed train in the same way that Will spoke about Anna.⁣