Suddenly, she bent her head over the table, cradling it gently with her long, slim fingers, shaking it from side to side it looked like. After a couple of minutes, I could hear her muffled voice, “I’m not sure that getting into this with me is a good idea for you, Aerin. I don’t have a well-spring of inner richness to share, and I’m ashamed to say that my only friendships have been with those friends you met last night – and sometimes, when I’m with them, I feel like I’ve already left them behind, because I had to go through so much since those innocent years of college. Because of that I sometimes feel I have less and less in common with them. I don’t know if you could see that but they’re still living their shiny, happy, glossy lives. And when I’m with them, it feels easy to slip into that feeling, of knowing a life like that, way back when.”

She paused for a second, and then continued, “I know that they genuinely care about me – well most of them do, anyway. But I know that that’s no longer how my life is defined. It hasn’t been a shiny, happy, glossy life for some time now.”

I bit my lip, hesitating to rub her back, because I didn’t know if she’d like that while she was like this, baring her soul to me.

Instead, I drew my arm around her, and hugged her to me from the side. I whispered, as I kissed her hair, “Harley, you don’t need the exterior glossiness that your friends continue to float through life in. You have something much, much richer. Way more illuminating. And it comes from your inside. You are the one person I’ve met who intuitively understands how to live in the richness of the present.   Maybe because the circumstances you found yourself in made you. Or maybe that’s who you have always been?”

“I know already that you don’t fear the past. And that you’ve planned a bright future for yourself, what with all your efforts to become a partner in that law firm. I’m just staggered by all that you are, baby. Things just happened in your life, things that would have knocked majority of the people I know flat on their asses. Knocked that shiny, happy, gloss right off of them. They would not have been able to get up the way you have, Harley, or succeeded as well.”