Love:
According to literature, there are seven types of love.
Love shared is not love divided. It is love multiplied.
It was shortly after starting at Rocket Factory, that Sam and James had taken me [Kate] to The Dog [5k run] as it was nicknamed. They were intermittent attendees due to her study and work. During the pre-prizegiving drinks, Sam and James introduced me to the crowd, including Tom whom they casually knew. He was there with his girlfriend Kelly. Sam introduced me as her new flatmate and friend and that I had come back to work at RF.
Tom had asked me what I was doing there. I told him that I was on propulsion, and he surprised me by replying, "1,2 or kick?" [stages].
I had never been asked this before and replied, "Mostly First so far." He actually showed genuine interest. But Kelly was looking sour at our interaction, despite James and Sam trying to engage her. However, there was something in my mind that I had met Tom before.
Later that night, I said to Sam that Tom looked vaguely familiar. She agreed but had no idea why either.
Over the next few months at The Dog, Sam, James, and I would chat to Tom and Kelly, she would always be sour when the three of us talked to him despite us trying to engage her in conversation.
After they had split, we talked to Tom alone. Invariably, we would get the mysterious 'hit' about Tom but could never isolate the reason.
It was when we were scrolling through our uni photos that it hit us: we had seen Tom at our classmate Jo's funeral. Jo had died suddenly which had hit us hard. He was delivering the eulogy for his fiancé and while he projected strength and compassion, we could see his life had been rent asunder.
It was near this time that Sam and James' relationship had fizzed out.
Occasionally we would see Tom at The Dog and exchange pleasantries. But the implicit rule there was that the only number you asked for was the one that was called out at the finish line. Tom was his usual pleasant self invariably chatting to Sam and I as we tended to mingle together, enquiring how my work was and taking an interest in my answers due to his family history in the sector. Occasionally when he was being particularly jocular, we would see a quick flash of something which we accepted as just him as we all had a side, and we had a possible cause for his rapid descent then ascent.
In our souls, there is a shelf labelled Love. Each person's shelf is a different size and stacked with different vessels. Each vessel contains a unique recipe.
In Tom's soul, the Love shelf was broad and stacked with a wide variety of labelled vessels. The vessel labelled Jo was in a corner, but still prominent. It was a vessel that he had hoped would continue to grow and be filled with an ever-richer liquid until his soul ended. But the filler tap had been suddenly wrenched away and the lid slammed shut. It had a lid that would sometimes let seep when Tom was in a particularly happy mood his side as we called it.
There used to be a small, partially filled bottle labelled Kelly. Kelly had been envious of the Jo bottle still prominent on the shelf and the affect of its seepage on Tom when his mood was at its sweetest. She had wanted the love contained in it to be transferred to her bottle and didn't understand that her bottle was being filled with fresh, new, additional love. This had caused her bottle (the relationship) to turn bitter, smash to the floor and then everything heads down the drain. Kelly did not understand about Love Multiplication.
The Jo bottle also existed on our shelves, albeit a smaller and with a simpler, gentle flavour.
Sadly, the bottle labelled Tom on Kelly's shelf was still there, rattling, the contents rancid and eating away at her shelf.
The bottle labelled Sam on his shelf had started off, like the one labelled Kate, as a small, gentle bottle that was infrequently seen but containing a simple, pleasant liquid that got infrequently topped with drips of new, similar liquid. But after they met on the run, the Sam bottle had transmuted into an amorphous, growing vessel that was rapidly being filled by a sweet and increasingly richly flavoured liquid, as was the Tom bottle on Sam's shelf.
Though, at the same time, the Jo bottle would sometimes seep during his happiest times causing his quick darkness. Sam knew that she was being loved deeper and wider in addition to his love for Jo, so she would open her Jo bottle and let her bottle's contents (memories) waft to Tom, lifting him back into happiness, thus enriching the contents of hers and Tom's bottles at the same time.
Tom's and my bottles were naturally smaller and contained the recipe of fun cousins, occasionally scented with a nip of Jo if I caught Tom's funk before Sam could.
For Tom, the Love shelf manifested itself in many physical forms.
His house was interesting and reflected his complexity. For a single guy's house, it wasn't all man. There were a few teddies dotted around that were gifts from people. The walls had a variety of paintings including two one SqM storm paintings that were gifts from his first flatmate.