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Thank you mellyjelly/drumthings for this fantabulous skin=D

But if you believe that you can recognise someone you have never met before, if you believe that there is just one person in the world for you, if you believe that there's only one other human being out there who you can love, truly love, for a lifetime - and I believe all of these things - then it follows that there's no point in pretending that tomorrow is another day and all that crap. Because I've had my chance.

Personally I don't believe you can steal one human being from another. You can't steal people... People are funny. They just slip away.

It's strange the way the loss of one person can leave such a giant hole in the middle of your life. It's not as if the hole they leave behind feels like the size of another human being. It feels more like the size of a world.

What did Rose see in me? She could have had the pick of any lipless wonder in her firm's office. Why did she choose me?

Because I'm a nice guy. That doesn't sound like much - it sounds like the kind of thing that women say they want, just before they go off with the spunky hunk in his Maserati. But Rose wanted a nice guy. And she picked me.

It's true. I was a nice guy. I always fell in love with the women I slept with, even when love was neither requested nor appropriate. I could never fuck around without feeling. A lot of the things that young men do without thinking were beyond me. Because I had listened to too many Sinatra records. Because I always wanted a trip to the moon on gossamer wings rather than a quick shag. Because I was looking for the one.

She saw something in me. Something that was worthy of love.

But niceness is finite. It's like money and youth. It ebbs away when you are not looking. It leaks out of you. Look at me now. I'm nowhere near as nice as I used to be.

I don't want to give up on life and love and all the rest of it, but I can't help myself. It's because life and love and all the rest of it have given me a good hiding. Life has made me feel like death warmed up.

I've lost my faith and I don't know how I can ever get it back. Because I still miss someone. And because I will always miss her.

Is that okay, Rose? Is it okay to miss you?

The airport is awash with real emotion today. Lovers saying goodbye and being reunited. Families are separating and coming back together. There are lots of hugs and laughter and tears. The departure gate is pretty interesting but the arrivals hall is even better, because you can't do it in your own time at arrivals. You can't decide when it's time to say hello in quite the same way that you can decide it's time to say goodbye. Hello just happens. The people anxiously waiting for someone don't know when that face is suddenly going to appear before them, slowly pushing a trolley, smiling through the jet lag, ready for a kiss and a cuddle, ready to begin again.

You think that you will watch someone die with something like horror, then you watch them die with nothing but love. Because somehow the horror passes, all the black feelings caused by the thousand unspeakable indignities of cancer, or at least you learn to exist with it all. But the love remains, and it overwhelms the fear and sadness and loss, that terrible sense of loss that is worse than everything.

But loving someone is not the same as liking them, is it? It's not the same as just accepting them for what they are. Love's all right, I guess. I don't know too much about all that. I'll settle for just being liked.

It's funny. You love something and then one day it's suddenly gone or changed or lost forever. But somehow that doesn't stop your love. Maybe that's how you know it's the real thing. When it doesn't come with conditions and get-out clauses, when it doesn't have a best-by date. When you just give your love, and never stop giving it, and know that you never will. That's when it's real. That's when they can never touch it or spoil it or take it away from you.

One For My Baby by Tony Parsons