"Student Union" - SJ Bottomley (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

wouldn’t have resulted in that kind of reaction. I would have just said to myself, “Oh, there’s so and so...” and carried straight on with what I was doing. Purely because it was Laura and no one else, that was the thing. Also, on top of this, it was obviously intensified by my seeing both Rachel and Kathryn at the same time. It was a fluke, a quirk of fate, nothing more and I have learnt since then, to take it as that, to take it on face value.
Once Laura had departed the scene, to go rapidly chasing after the next thing that she was looking for, I quickly regained my focus. This was about Kathryn, not her. What I had managed to notice in all the hustle and the bustle and the looking into her eyes and everything else, was that there was a significant difference in the way I felt when I first saw the two women. Because I wasn’t in the slightest bit aware that I was going to see either of them, I feel that then feelings that I had were absolutely genuine. They weren’t forced. I wasn’t preparing myself to see them and so I wasn’t in any way telling myself how I should or shouldn’t feel. They were, as I say, genuine. I’d like to talk about Kathryn first, if I may. Walking round the corner of the aisle and towards the tills, I wasn’t thinking about anything. Just going along, really. Then...There she was. And I saw her. Immediately, probably even before the surprise got to me, the overwhelming feeling that I got was of love. It’s hard to put into words and probably sounds a bit daft to you now, reading this, but that is what I felt. It was, near enough, the kind of thing that I felt whenever I saw her when she used to work there. When I used to go in to do some shopping and I realised that she was working, my heart would skip and I would feel all warm and fuzzy inside and I would also probably smile a little as well. This was what usually, if not always happened, when my eyes found her in the store. This time, it was very much like that, except that it was about a thousand times more intensified than it was normally. I hadn’t seen her in over three months, I thought I’d never see her again and here she was, in the flesh, only a short distance away from me. It was an unbelievable feeling. Just brilliant. Now, you would expect, or I would have expected, anyway, to experience a similar kind of thing when I knew that it was Laura that was racing past me. For whatever reason, though, I didn’t. I just didn’t. As much as I would have liked to feel love for her, I wasn’t able to do that. Instead, I felt...Well, nothing. Nothing at all. It was weird. I’m not sure why this was and I would really like to know. I was under the impression that deep down, I still loved her. Even after...seven, nearly eight years. That is a long time, I know. But I sincerely thought that something like that didn’t ever go away. That it lasted forever. I was wrong. She was just Laura, someone that I was once madly infatuated with, but not anymore. Unfortunately.
I still had one thing that I needed to do. I had to pay for my stuff and get out of this place before anymore weird things happened. I still wasn’t convinced that if I went to the gents, Georgina wouldn’t brush past me. After what I’d seen, all things were possible, I thought. So, I had to leave as quickly as possible and try, somehow, to get back on planet Earth. Quickly recomposing myself, I made sure that my feet weren’t stuck to the floor, as they had seemed to be for the past two or three minutes. When I discovered that they weren’t, with something of a wave of relief rushing through me, I moved on. I was back in Kathryn mode now, after that temporary and troublesome distraction that had been brought on by our friend Laura. I knew what I had to do and I was setting off to do it. I headed back to where I had been earlier and after a short while, I emerged from around that corner again, and in that instant, Kathryn came into my sight again. Now, as expected, came that usual reaction that I was referring to above. I knew that she was here now. I knew that when I walked past the corner, unless she had gone on a break in the meantime, she would still be there. She was still there. It had only been three or four minutes, at the most, so this was as I thought that it would be. Upon seeing her again, I felt the warm, fuzzy, loving feeling as always, and it was at that normal level. Nothing overly extreme, as it had been before, just normal, just even, just nice. And it was nice. It was very nice indeed. She looked wonderful. What else can I say? Completely gorgeous. At that moment, I realised exactly what I had missed. This was something that didn’t happen anymore. I didn’t have the means to feel like that now. As I was saying earlier, Linzi was great, she was, but what she most certainly wasn’t, was Kathryn. There is nobody else quite like Kathryn. At that moment, I knew that more than ever before. I think that in the period since she left and this instance now; in this time, I think that I’ve coped pretty well. To me, it really could have gone one way or another after she had left. Very easily, I believe, I could have taken the news the wrong way and go into a funk or whatever you want to call it, thinking melodramatically that the whole world was about to come to an end and that nothing would ever be the same again. Well, nothing would probably be the same again, but the world certainly was not coming to an end. I was, instead, and unusually for me, you might argue, was realistic about what was happening. Yes, I loved Kathryn. Unquestionably I loved her. I still do love her. This, I hope, is something that will never fade, like it evidently has done with Laura. I want to feel that way about her for the rest of my life, forever. I accept that and I am happy to have this kind of mindset about it. On the other hand, though, there has to be a certain amount of pragmatism involved. I knew right from the very start, you’d have to say, that Kathryn and I were never going to be anymore than work colleagues, maybe friends at the very, very most. What we were definitely not going to be, at any point in time, were lovers. This was something that I got my head around reasonably quickly. And, as I said in “Avril Lavigne”, this was what probably helped me most when it came to never getting into a tizzy about her. Knowing that she didn’t feel the same way about me as I felt about her meant that I never got to travel down that slippery and very painful slope that leads ultimately to rejection. I was spared this with Kathryn and I have to be thankful for that, I think. The same can be said for when it happened the second time. Even though I might have been in love with her again, the same sort of thing still applied. Nothing was ever going to happen. I knew that and had to accept it. This was where the necessity for me to be realistic comes in. She had left. Alright, I now had a choice to make. I chose what was the more sensible option. I have learnt a lot from what has happened to me in the past and those experiences have taught me that things like this, instances like the one that I found myself in with Kathryn, aren’t worth getting that bothered about. It’s not a justification of how much I might love someone if I mope about them after they have gone from my life. That really doesn’t achieve anything and I understand that now. That was why, with Kathryn, it made a lot of sense for me to not forget about her, as such, because that wouldn’t really have been possible, I don’t think. But, more like just getting on with things. It was sad and I would have much preferred if it hadn’t have happened. In an ideal world, if Kathryn and I could never be together, then the next best thing would have been for the situation to stay exactly the same as it was for as long as possible. For the foreseeable future, I would have been nothing short of ecstatic if she would have stayed where she was and that I was able to see her on some of the occasions that I went in there. She didn’t have to be there every time, but more often than not, that would have been very acceptable. As it was, things sadly didn’t turn out that way. I had to cope with what I had. So, what I decided to do was firstly, try my best to keep calm and not let the bad news get to me. This wasn’t, by any means, the end of the world. Nobody had died or anything close to that kind of extreme. Simply, I wasn’t able to see somebody that I cared for, anymore. That was all. Then, after that, just take things as they came. I missed her. Of course I did. It would have been downright bizarre if I didn’t, frankly. But, surely there would be new opportunities that would come at some point in the future. If you like, you might go as far as saying, looking at it in a startlingly positive way, it might even be better for me that this happened, rather than the whole thing with Kathryn dragging on month after month and eventually, year after year. Alright, I could love her from afar, but what good was that doing me, really? Not much, I suppose. Now, with Kathryn out of the way for good, save the odd sighting in Tesco, if she were to come back again in the future; I was, in a way, free from her. This might, I guess, sound a little contradictory and chances are that it is. I adored her and was absolutely besotted with her, so in that sense, it was a bit rich of me to then turn round and say that it was good that we were now separated. But, I don’t know. That is kind of the way that I feel. Of course, I have no idea what is coming next, what is in store for me in the coming weeks and months. It could well be nothing. However, if something is to come up, through whatever channel, I will now be able to embrace it without the thought of Kathryn. I like to think of it, almost, as a monkey off my back. A nice monkey, an attractive, sexy as hell monkey, but a monkey all the same. This may, in the long run, turn out to be completely wrong. Still, this is the attitude that I had at the time, the attitude that I had when I saw her in Tesco before Christmas and the attitude that I still have now. Ask me again in six months or so time, if I feel the same then and it will be interesting, I think, to see what kind of an answer I come out with, when we are that further on down