three

                                    

                                          
Olivia,
                          
The morning after that fateful night, I was different. It wasn't a different that could easily be put into words. The sun seemed brighter, the grass smelled sweeter and my world seemed larger. That night had been the first night in as long as a could remember that I really felt like a real person; not some mindless robot or a brain roaming around in a sack of skin.
                          
Talking to you was like getting a taste of the life I was missing. I had forgotten what it was like to not have a conversation that revolved around cells, pathologies and procedures. And your life, Olivia, your life was so different from my own, but so similar at the same time. We both had dreams. We both had goals, but the approaches couldn't be more different. I had always had a plan, I had always stuck to the plan and never strayed from the path. You, however, you weren't afraid of life taking you another direction. A true free-spirit that let the wind take you in whatever direction it blew. I couldn't imagine the uncertainty that you had felt, the struggles you felt when the path wasn't clear. 
                          
To be fair, Olivia, I still don't understand how you did it. You swear it was just trusting fate, but I think it was more than that. Trusting fate was one thing, but actually falling for fate, actually letting fate choose your every action, that was closer to choosing adventure- the little flicker of crazy that I saw glimpses of now and then. 
                          
I think it was that flicker, that spark of adventure, that led your face to keep popping into my mind night after night that week. Niall would ask me what was wrong, why I was acting so weird, what had my head up in the clouds and my feet off the ground. I never had an explanation for him. I blamed it on stress. I blamed it on not knowing what to do now that I finally had some time to myself. I blamed it on everything but a chance encounter with an aspiring young author in a New York City bar. One with eyes that I couldn't seem to get out of my head and a smile that haunted my every dream. 
                          
This didn't happen to me. This didn't happen to Harry Styles. Although I can't say that I was ever a ladies man, I kept my cool, and I'd never found myself so enamored with a girl, so infatuated with someone after such a short period of time. 
                          
That next day I also realized that I very well had made the biggest mistake of my life thus far, not getting your number, not finding a time to see you again. Here I had met an incredible woman, a woman who was inspiring, a woman who had given me that indescribable feeling- and I had let her slip through my fingers. 
                          
Niall asked me about you. Asked me about what had happened to that girl I had been "chatting up at the bar". I told him you had to leave. He gave me that face guys give each other to subtly tell the other one they dropped the ball and they blew it. 
                          
I knew I blew it, I knew I blew it with you. And I wanted to not care, I wanted to move on and forget the whole thing had even happened. I wanted to look back on that night in five years and not remember it as anything but the night after I finished my first year of medical school. 
                          
But I couldn't. Or at least I couldn't for a while. Because how do you forget about a night where you made a connection like that? How do you forget about a night where your outlook on life had been totally flipped around?
                          
I never told you this did I? I never told you just how much that first night had changed me. Maybe that's because I was so afraid that if I had you may have run the entire other direction. You didn't tell someone they changed your life after a simple conversation in a bar, not if you didn't want to seem like some totally enamored fool anyway.
                          
But I should have. I should have told you this then, instead of now,  because then maybe you would understand just how deep our connection was, just how much you came to mean to me in just a short amount of time. 
                          
Or maybe I just should have told you that night, in the bar, instead of letting you be whisked away by your friends without a trace, almost as if you had never existed. I should have recognized how extraordinary you were from those first few minutes of conversation. I should have made a move.
                          
But then again, with all your "trusting fate", I suppose it was meant to be that way, because next time I met you, I would know exactly what to do.
                          
All the love,
                          
H