Good Enough

He haunts my dreams.

He has been haunting my dreams.

He stalks through them, searching for me, his prey.

He knows how I ache to be near him, to feel his skin against mine, to hear him pronounce my name with the care and attention he affords every word that comes out of his mouth.

And so I run away.



We call him Lou, as in Lupin, as in Wolf.

Kendra found him, and christened him.

I’d met Kendra Phillips when she was an art student at LSE and I was finishing my last year at sixth form.

I’d been in Covent Garden, sat outside a café where I’d chosen to wait for Jack, my then boyfriend.

My hair then had been a medley of baby pinks, rich burgundy reds, purple blues, teal greens and everything in between.

Kendra later described it as ‘the colours of the setting sun over a tropical sea’, doing it more justice than I ever could.

She asked me if she could take a photo of me, for her blog.

We begun talking. She was doing a Fine Art degree, but she’d taken up a part time photography course as a hobbie.

She took note of everything in my outfit. She asked me about how I decided to do my hair, where the leather bracelet on my wrist was from, the story of the red ribbon.

In my old school, and increasingly in my sixth form, it had become a sign that you cared. If you wore a red ribbon round your wrist, you declared that you would help sufferers of depression if you could. You declared that you understood.

When I told Kendra the story of the red ribbon, I’d told her more of the real story than anybody else.

Then Jack came back, and she hurriedly excused herself with a smile, and gave me her card.

I forgot all about her until a week later when Chloe Morellis, then my closest friend, sent me a link of the article on her blog.

It had received five hundred and sixty three likes on Stumbleupon, Chloe told me.

All thirty nine comments on it were complimentary.

That’s what I wanted from life, I wanted people to know who I was. I wanted people to like me. I wanted them to want to be me.



I didn’t see Kendra again till a year and a half later.

Jack and I had just made up again, and we were on our way to a mutual friends birthday party in Stoke Newington.

It was fancy dress. Jack and I had black body paint covering our skin in swirling patterns. We were in black striped outfits that fit the patterns on out skin as closely as possible.

My hair- long, turquoise and curly- stood out.

She photographed us both this time, before recognising me.

“Are you Katya Simmons?” she asked as she took down the details of our outfits.

I nodded, surprised that she knew who I was but not displeased.

“I’m Kendra Phillips,” she carried on. “I photographed you, almost two years ago now, in Covent Garden.”

Realisation dawned.

“I thought it was you,” she carried on when I told her I remembered her, “but I wasn’t sure until I saw your bracelets.” She indicated the two red ribbons and the leather bracelet that I always wore, and still wear.

“You got stuck in my head,” she said soon after, as she was leaving. “You’re special. The best person I photographed by far.”

And so this time, before we parted, she gave me her number, and took mine.

It was the start of something beautiful.