Allison

When I met JD I was taken aback. He was sitting with me in the library on the ship flirting. There was a whole ship full of women there to swoon after him and he was closed up in a dark, quiet library with me. Flirting! Then I began to think that maybe it was part of the act; maybe he did this with all the girls he met on the ship. You know; made them think they were special when in fact, it was just his job to do that.

A little mingling with some of the ladies at happy hour who were cruise veterans told me that was not the case; the guys rarely interacted one on one with cruisers and never were alone with them. I felt kind of sad for those women, really, they knew more about the lives of these celebrities and the ins and outs of meeting them and interacting with them, but I wondered why they weren't at home with the men who married them and yes, most of them were married.

Later that night, I had gone to my cabin early and gotten a surprise knock on the door; it was JD. He was quite alone and asked if he could come in. We sat on my balcony drinking a bottle of champagne and talked the entire night away. It felt like an evening with an old friend and by the end of the night I knew I was falling for him and terrified that once he came to the realization that I was an ordinary single mom who worked retail he wouldn't be interested. 

The entire trip he continued to seek me out when he had a spare moment. We built a sandcastle together with his son, had a dance when there was a fan mingling night, spent hours alone in his cabin talking about anything, everything and nothing at all and of course there was the night he took me to a deck on the ship that had been closed off and we watched the sun sink below the sea in silence. He promised me then that he would make it work with me; that he wanted to be with me and I was still wary of that promise. 

But in the end, he kept his promise.

Music and my heart

You're probably going to think I'm the biggest whackjob there ever was for saying this, but here goes. I love Mumford and Sons, but I find that I can't listen to more than one or two songs of theirs at a time. It's not just them either, it's several artists. They just evoke an emotion in me that makes me....sad. At first I just thought it was Tori Amos because her subject matter (Me and a Gun, Your Cloud and Toast immediately come to mind) is often depressing and dark. And then I thought...maybe it's not the content alone, but memories. Sarah McLachlan was ruined for me because I listened to her during a phase when I was going through a break-up and life changes, but no....I had only heard one or two Mumford and Son song and I loved them...so I put them on Spotify and found...they made me sad. I would like to blame Bluegrass as a whole, but I can't. Bluegrass normally makes me giggle or slightly nauseated. It's weird and makes me wonder if the music grabs some part of my soul or heart strings and pulls it with certain chords and refrains. Mumford and Sons on the whole makes me think of a tragic dramatic film score where there's this beautiful woman and her strong man goes away to war and just when she thinks him dead, he appears...travelworn and somehow older, but she finds that he smells the same when she embraces him and she has tears in her eyes as she re-introduces him to their children in the hot summer sun as tears of joy stream down her face.

I don't know why I can see this scene when I hear their music. It just does. Perhaps it's the muse of my next novel speaking to me through them and I ought to lock myself in a room with my trusty laptop, Apple (it's a Dell actually, but it's Apple Green color) and bang this out into a rough draft. It would be a period romance for certain and actually probably not a romance at all, but a drama. Something I've never written before. It would require research of a time period I've often found interesting. And as I've written this, the name Allie strikes me. Allie or Alvie and perhaps Walter. I can feel it. I can feel the story. The heat of the sun on her skin and the solace she feels in his embrace, the way holding her quells the nightmares he's faced.