Meet Harper — Hello, I Love You, won’t you tell me your name.

As I write this piece, all I can hear is a song by The Doors — and one particular lyric that keeps playing over and over in my mind.

So maybe this is how Harper introduces herself?

The song goes:

“Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?”

So here I go. Apparently, you’re meant to meet Harper and jump into her game.

The irony — Harper does NOT like games.

Well, that’s not entirely true. She likes actual games, the fun ones. Not the ridiculous psychological games humans play. Those bore and exhaust her. She’s not particularly good at actual games either, but she’ll give them a red-hot go until she gets bored. Then she’s done.

Game over.

Next.

With ALL games.

Not here for it.

But when it comes to people? No. Harper doesn’t do games, and she certainly doesn’t suffer fools.

Harper is not a surface-dwelling human. She loves hard. Deeply. Completely. Probably more than is always sensible. She wears her heart on her sleeve, although she’d probably tell you she doesn’t. And if someone hurts that heart, you can be pretty sure Harper will register it. She might not outwardly react, and she might even convince you she hasn’t noticed, but Harper notices everything.

She just has an interesting way of processing it.

There will probably be some overthinking. Okay, there will definitely be some overthinking.

There may also be a deep conversation with herself. Because Harper talks to herself, ‘I’m my own best friend’ – Is her common retort.

Not in a concerning way.

Well…

I’ll let you decide.

I actually think the conversations we have with ourselves are often far more honest than the ones we have with everyone else. Harper is totally okay on her own because that is where she processes her world. Alone. Not in an I don’t want anyone around kind of way, but more of a let me do what I need to do and THEN I’ll come back out kind of way.

Who really is Harper?

She’s strangely funny, she’s emotional, she’s curious and she’s a little bit easily distracted.

Okay…

A LOT distracted.

She can wander off down an emotional rabbit hole and suddenly find herself questioning something that happened three days ago, three months ago or quite possibly three years ago.

You know the sort of thing.

You’re brushing your teeth and suddenly your brain goes:

Remember that thing you said in 2017?

No?

Just Harper then?

She feels things deeply, yet she is fiercely fiery and incredibly forgiving. That’s probably the simplest way I can describe her. She feels things deeply, and perhaps that’s both her greatest strength and one of the things that gets her into trouble.

Because when you love deeply, you also have the capacity to hurt deeply.

Harper doesn’t necessarily turn hurt into revenge. She’s not interested in destroying people, nor is she interested in revenge. In fact, she detests it.

She does something much more interesting.

She alchemises pain and fire and turns it into something — strength, perspective, growth, or occasionally a very, very long internal conversation where she argues both sides of the situation and somehow manages to lose the argument with herself.

And then there is Hudson.

Ah.

Hudson.

I’m not going to tell you too much about him yet, partly because I quite like making you wonder what on earth this man has to do with Harper, and partly because Hudson is the sort of man who probably wouldn’t appreciate me explaining him to you anyway.

Hudson is different.

Where Harper can wander around inside her thoughts, Hudson tends to have his thoughts lined up neatly in rows, like a stale white-lit room where everything has its place.

He’s calmer, more analytical and more structured.

Incredibly frustrating for someone like Harper.

He’s the sort of person who probably knows where his keys are.

She, on the other hand, has to have a spot — or two — where they might be.

But they’re usually in one of those three and if they’re not then……

Well.

Good luck.

Harper is kind, nurturing and fiercely loyal. But sometimes she’s fiercely loyal to the wrong people. And THAT is where her walls come from.

So what happens when you put two people together who have built themselves in very different ways? One has walls. The other has boundaries. One feels everything. The other has learnt to contain everything.

You get — CONFLICT.

And not the comfortable kind.

We have two people who see the world differently.

Two people who overthink.

Two people who have very different walls.

AND…

Two people who aren’t actually that different at all.

Because let’s be honest. Sometimes attraction doesn’t arrive looking particularly convenient or pretty, nor does it necessarily feel comfortable or safe — especially when you’ve spent a long time being programmed for survival and ‘pretty’.

Sometimes attraction happens at the most inconvenient and unconventional times. Times that, to the natural world, don’t fit the narrative or look particularly conventional.

So – say Hi to Harper, she loves you even before she has met you. She wants to know you deeply. Not the surface part of you – the deep part of you. She wants to know your ugly and she wants to help you to see – pain is not the end – its the beginning.

She also hopes one day…… she will see the end of her own pain…….

Sometimes it arrives in the form of a person who makes you so uncomfortable that you have no choice but to look at yourself differently.

And sometimes, that person becomes the catalyst for change you didn’t even know you needed.

That’s Harper.

And that’s Hudson.

At least, that’s what I’m prepared to tell you right now.

Because there is something I don’t want to do with Harper.

I don’t want to explain her to you.

I want you to meet her.

I want you to hear the way she thinks, see the way she reacts and perhaps recognise a little bit of yourself in her — even if you don’t want to admit it.

This story, and the ones that will follow in the series after Harper and Hudson, are about more than just two people finding each other.

I want you to see that maybe there is a little part of you that has felt the way Harper has.

Or perhaps you’ve had your own version of a Hudson-style experience.

Maybe you’ve loved the wrong person.

Maybe you’ve built walls.

Maybe you’ve learnt to survive in ways that once served you but don’t necessarily serve you anymore.

And maybe, just maybe, the person who comes into your life isn’t there to fix you.

Maybe they’re there to show you something you couldn’t see for yourself.

I don’t want you to feel sorry for Harper.

I want you to vouch for her.

I want you to want her to win as much as she wants to see you win.

I want you to laugh with her and at her. Possibly roll your eyes at her. Maybe even yell at her a little.

Because Harper isn’t perfect.

And thank goodness for that.

Perfect characters are exhausting.

Give me a woman who gets distracted, overthinks, loves too hard, says the wrong thing occasionally and then lies awake wondering why the hell she said it. Give me someone who can walk into a room feeling reasonably confident and walk out wondering if she just made a complete fool of herself.

Give me someone who can love someone else deeply and still have to learn how to come home to herself.

Now that is interesting.

And perhaps that’s why I’ve become rather fond of Harper.

She isn’t a woman who has everything figured out.

She’s a woman figuring it out.

And maybe that’s what makes her worth meeting.

So, hello Harper.

Hello Hudson.

And hello, apparently, to the beginning of their little game.

Although, just to be clear…

Harper still doesn’t like games.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether Hudson knows that yet.