Once upon a time I had an English boyfriend, whose mum liked to rearrange things around the house a lot. I stayed with them twice. Sometime between the first and the second time she had installed some shelves next to the sofa-bed we used to sleep in and filled them with –among other things– books. I like being around books. One morning, alone in the room waiting for David to finish doing something or other I decided to pick one of them –randomly– and open it –equally randomly– in search of instant wisdom. The plan seemed to go somewhat wrong when I realised that the first book I had picked was one given out for free with the Cosmopolitan magazine – a symbol of many things, of which wisdom isn’t the most characteristic – but I decided to persevere. I opened it. There was a chapter dealing with the “why do I get so very scared when I fall in love?” question, and there I read something along the lines of this:

“As a very wise woman I know once told me, ‘love brings to the surface everything we have inside us that is not like it’.”

I’ve known two things ever since: that you can find wisdom even in unlikely-looking places, and that love brings to the surface everything that is not like it. (It would sound good to also say I stopped looking down on Cosmopolitan, but it would be a lie.)

I told Martijn this story (while making spinach pie) a couple of days before he had to go back to the Netherlands the first time he came to visit me in Athens. It made perfect sense, as did everything back then. That was January. Nine funny –strange– months later it is October; not so many things make sense; and I need to remind myself. Love brings to the surface everything that is not like it. There is a reason why those nine months have been funny. And it’s all for the best.