Cecelia Ahern - The Year I Met You

This wasn’t just my journey, this wasn’t just about me falling down and a man rescuing me, though I did trip and you fell and love did happen for me and was mended and repaired for you. This is about you and me, our fall and rise with the seasons, and about what happened when one door closed for both of us. I don’t know if I would be this woman now if it weren’t for you, and you may not even think you did anything. Most people in life don’t have to actively do anything to change us, they simply need to be . I reacted to you. You affected me. You helped me. You were the oddest friendship, the kindest loaned ear. You told me once during one of those long, dark, cold winter nights at the garden table, though you were embarrassed to say it and probably too drunk to remember it now, that you were locked out in the cold and I let you in time and time again. I had a simple reply at the time, but didn’t realise the true meaning of my words – you gave me your key.

I think you did the same for me.

I helped you help me, you helped me to help you, that’s the way it must be or the very idea of help would be obsolete. I always thought that being helped was a loss of control, but you must allow someone to help you, you must want someone to help you, and only then can the act begin.

The transformation from chrysalis can take weeks, months or even years – mine took one year. And although I have become this person, I’m still in the midst of a larger transformation, one that I won’t recognise until I look back at me now and say ‘Who was that girl?’ We are constantly evolving; I suppose I have always known that, but because I always knew that, I feared stopping, and it is ironic that it was only when I finally stopped that I moved the most. I know now that we never truly stop, our journey is never complete, because we will continue to flourish – just as when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.