UNASSUMING
You know, when he first walked into our lives, I nearly choked on my breath at the sight of him. Beauty like that shouldn’t exist—that was my first thought. I was fourteen. My grandmother, then sixty-five, took one look at him and declared, *”He’s a god.”* No idea where my father had met him, but suddenly, he was a regular in our home. He and Dad would scribble down sheet music or lounge about with sandwiches on plates, laughing over vodka. And when they drank—oh, the stories, the jokes, the effortless charm. He wasn’t just beautiful; he *glowed* with it.
Whenever he visited, I canceled every plan with my mates. Why waste time at the cinema when *he* was in the house?
He was an RAF pilot. Once, he even arrived in uniform. Big mistake—my fourteen-year-old heart couldn’t take it.
Then he started haunting my dreams.
But it wasn’t love. Love is for *people*. And he? Divine.
Then, one evening—*the* evening. He invited my parents over. Did I beg to tag along, or did they just bring me? No groveling, no humiliation—just me, buzzing with anticipation, waiting to meet *her*. She had to be stunning, right? A goddess, surely, if *he* had chosen her.
I’ll never forget the way my stomach dropped when she opened the door. If you’d swung a sledgehammer at my skull, it wouldn’t have crushed me as hard as that disappointment. She was… plain. No makeup, mousy hair, washed-out like an overcast day in Manchester. Grey. *Unremarkable.*
I stepped inside, my world tilting on its axis. At fourteen, I’d just learned life’s cruelest joke: injustice wore a cardigan and served tea.
Then she spoke.
Turns out, she held a doctorate in biology. Wit sharp as a scalpel, stories that lit up the room. I hung on every word, mouth slack, until—somehow—I stopped seeing the plainness.
Then I glanced at *him*. Strange—his perfect edges had blurred too. They fit. They *matched*.
By the time we left, it all made sense.
He visited a few more times before they moved away. RAF postings, I suppose. Years later, I heard he’d had a stroke. Paralysed. And *she*—his hands, his legs, his nurse, his world. She loved him. Stayed. Made him whole.
I’ll never know what that golden god saw in her that day. Her mind? Probably—she was brilliant long before the title. Her spark? Maybe. Youth could’ve painted her in brighter colours once.
But here’s the thing:
We don’t *choose* who we’re given. Don’t know why our eyes catch on one soul in a crowd. What pulls us together? A mystery.
Still, I think—when he saw that unassuming girl, he saw his anchor. His safe harbour.
And he wasn’t wrong.