Freedom was my first thought when I stepped off the plane. Freedom from what, I could not say, but I was free.
	I hadn't had a rough upbringing. That wasn't what I would call it. It wasn't rough in the sense that I was poor, or I was antisocial, or I was born disabled. 
	My parents divorced and split before I could remember. My mother had me most of the time, my father took me on weekends. I was an emotional young child. I didn't throw temper tantrums like you'd expect of a young boy, but I cried almost objectively too much. My father wanted to take that out of me in any way he can. At times, it seemed like he hated me, but he always contended that he just wanted his son to be a man. He'd said I spent too much time around women, my mother and his, and that made me sensitive. It made me weak. At some point, I stopped. I stopped feeling, and I lost what was, in his eyes, weakness. I still wanted my future badly. I wasn't depressed. I still loved and liked and enjoyed life but I never hated again. I couldn't hate anyone and events stopped fazing me and I was just always happy, or at least content. For a bit, I wondered what was wrong with me, if I was a sociopath or a psychopath or if anything that was diagnosable was wrong with me, and then I simply decided it wasn't a problem.
	But when I saw her, I felt I could be more. That isn't accurate. I felt I could be anything,  but at the very least I could be more than the emotionless husk of a human being I so often felt I was. 
	She had short, even, straight black hair, going down to about the middle of her cheeks. A small bit of her hair was parted from the rest. She was beautiful.
	It wasn't love at first sight. I wasn't sure from the second I saw her that I was in love with her. But I loved what she represented. Here I was, in this country, a massive border separating me from my asshole father and everything else that I didn't want to be a part of or related to. Here I was, ready to let myself start feeling again, where someone telling me I was being too sensitive could be told to fuck off in return.
	It was as if a pain that I did not have had been relieved, a crime I'd not committed or known about being absolved.
	"You new here?" 
	The question startled me, because it was coming out of the mouth belonging to the face that represented freedom and being away and all of the things I knew I loved. It spoke. To me.
	"Fairly," was all I could think to say after being caught off guard.
	It had only been a few weeks, and I'd found an apartment and a decent short-term job. The neighborhood was vaguely similar to that of one of the many I'd occupied during my childhood with my mother. 
	"I grew up here. It's fun, being able to tell the new ones apart."
	The calm, sometimes authoritative manner that I spoke in suddenly seemed to return in full force, with more charm than I was accustomed to. "You know there's no sport in it."
	A hint of a smile crept upon her face, and the feeling of wonder that occupied me whenever I thought about my new life took me by storm.
	"What's your name?"
	"Matthew."
	"Jane." She reached out to shake my hand, and I accepted, making eye contact and with a tight grip as I had been taught.