You're here for only one more week, and then you'll be off to your merry London for your last six months of training before you become a full-fledged solicitor. I know that when the time comes, I will shake your hand and wish you a safe trip, and you will shake mine and wish me good luck in law school. It will be all very proper and polite (for appearances are everything), and when I smile, it might perhaps even be a bit sad. You were the only one I talked to on a familiar, comfortable level in the law firm, after all.

But you do not know, not even the littlest bit, of what kind of impact you made on me, and I will never let you know. You left a sickness in me that I couldn't wave away; I found myself looking at the world in your eyes, and it was not pretty. I did not like the way you smoke and drank and belittled those who did not deserve it: this woman was a twat, that person was a fucking moron, and so on and so forth. If you hadn't said those things to my face, I wouldn't have believed it, not with your flushed boyish face and innocent grin. But you said those things, and more, and the more time I spent with you, the more often I found myself complaining of the things that did not bother me before, and this change in me did not please me at all.

There were many things I wanted to say, but never could find the words.

I did not trust you, not with the way you spoke so scathingly of others (for you would be quick to turn on me, too, I think), but you seemed to think I was worth talking to, saying hello and good-bye to. You gave me CDs for me to listen to; you smiled when you saw me; you threw paperclips at me and sent me amusing mocking emails. You told me you were part Scottish and part Austrian; you liked reading Pratchett; and that your memories of Cambridge University were nostalgic but not all pleasant. You trusted me enough to correct your work and your grammar, seemed genuinely pleased at finding out I was quitting to go to law school, and trusted me enough to share beers (pilfered from our firm's storage rooms) in the early morning hours while we worked. You promised to give a good word for me with the London hiring partners when I, too, became a lawyer.

You said that you enjoyed New York City; thought it was safer than London. I bit my lip from saying, you spent your last six months in the posh Upper East Side (a $3000/month apartment that our posh English firm paid for), of course the world is safer.

You even let me stay in your flat for a precious two hours of sleep when we stayed up all night doing a trivial due diligence, though we breathed not a word when we came back to the office (because claiming that I saw your girlfriend there - true as it may be - wouldn't have made the gossip any less vicious).

But I still did not trust you. I still do not. I think that you are probably a very nice person (or try to be), but outside of work we would have simply passed each other by. I do not like your habits, nor your impatience, but those I could have lived with. It was your dissatisfaction with life that I could not cope with; I could not stay around you for very long before I found myself thinking the same way. You encouraged the quiet unhappiness buried inside of me; you made me jealous with your stories of all the places you visited, the things you did. You did the worst thing possible to me; you made me deeply shamed that I was born so close to the poverty line.

I think I will always remember you in that one moment in July at 3 AM, in your proper white shirt and cufflinks, smoking idly outside the building while I stood there dumbly watching you. You had asked me three times to accompany you before you finally added, a little exasperated, that I did not have to smoke as well, but once outside the building I found myself at a loss for words.

Groping for the right words turned out to be futile, so I stared wordlessly at your pensive face, studying your features with my eyes. The yellow streetlamps made your pale cheeks seem even paler; and your eyes were heavy-lidded from fatigue, your long lashes drooping to touch your cheeks. With your eyebrows drawn down, your lips set in a thin line (when it wasn't occupied by the cigarette), you looked almost angry. You certainly did not look happy; there was a grimness to the way you smoked, as if the cigarette was your only lifeline. I tried to remember the time where you were nothing more than a stranger and that I'd only nod to you in hallways out of politeness, but could not.

I saw you take a breath as if you were going to say something and I looked away, slightly uncomfortable and suddenly embarrassed. I did not want to meet your eyes at that moment (we were the same height and it was all too easy to), because I was afraid you'd be able to read my thoughts.

I was scared, you see. I looked at you and suddenly realized that there were going to be many people like you in law school...

...and that if I didn't find some way to cope with it now, I'd be buried by the monster of your restless, wordless unhappiness.

And when I realized that, I shivered uncomfortably in the humid New York City heat and stepped away from you, looking at the sky for a single star to keep me company in that long lonely night. I told myself, a silent star would be better company.

And in the last, final layer of my heart, underneath the superficial social words and the part of me that struggles to be a good person, I will be very glad to see you go.