Messages To Joe | J.S

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Tuesday 5th February 2019:

I had to admit that this whole 'plan' hasn't been considered very carefully by me, and if I was honest, I was jumping ahead of the gun by getting Caspar involved already, but I was so convinced I'd go ahead with it - and that it would work too.
I was expecting Kim any minute and I had the papers laid out on the kitchen counter ready to show her, my messy writing dragging highlighter arrows between the points: I was serious about this, because there was going to be no more fucking about between us.

'Hiya!' Kim had come in whilst I was away with the angels, reading my own notes carefully. 'Ghees, that's a lot of work, you done all this today?' I laughed and shook my head, ushering her to it opposite me and the pages.

'No, I did it over this week,' Kim giggled at me, watching my serious expression and becoming even more amused. 'Kim; I'm serious about this, and I need your full help, if you don't want to, I understand.'

'No! I've been here since the start and I'm gonna be here til the end, now go ahead.'

'So Joe told me everything...' I went on about exactly - almost word for word - what Joe has said to me a few days before and the way he looked at me, the sadness I saw in his eyes, everything. Then I told her the backstory of us: all of it. Because I've held so much back from her and I felt like if it really was now or never, I should open up to Kim in order to earn her full help.

'Right, so what do you want me to do?'

'We're going to need balloons.'

'Balloons?'

'Balloons.' Once again, the smile played on Kim's lips whilst my face was blank and emotionless, I was deadly serious. 'And we need pumps for those balloons.'

'How many balloons do we need?' I reached for a pad of post-it notes and a pen and wrote '3-0-0'. 'Three hundred balloons? Right, what else?'

'Other party things, just random things, hats, maybe a piñata!' She must've thought that I was insane- hell, even I thought I was insane. This was never going to work and it was so dead ended, I had no idea what it was meant to achieve.

'Are we doing a plan, or throwing him a birthday party?'

'KIMMM!' I groaned, grabbing at my face with my palms.

'I'm sorry, can you just tell me what you want to get from this?'

'I want to say 'it's okay'. Like I want to break this wall, I want to say 'let's have a laugh' and things like that. It's not meant to achieve much for our relationship, I get that, I really do, but maybe we can just restart? I don't know Kim, I truly don't, I just want to be sane again.' She nodded understandingly.

'Right!' She grabbed at the papers again, 'let's do this then!' I smiled as she did too and we began talking plans, numbers and people. 'I know you might not want it, but, I think we should ask Luke and Sam to help, they're the only people around right now- everyone else is at uni or work or other places, and they'll be willing to do you this favour, do you mind?' I shook my head, the more hands we could get on the job, the merrier.
I told Kim that Caspar would keep Joe occupied as we'd have a closed window of opportunity, all the more reason to have people helping. She seemed pretty keen, and I hoped to God this was going to work.

'If we're gonna be working this hard, we're going to need snacks!' Kim nodded, writing it down on another post-it note.

'Sam can do that!' She laughed, grabbing one of my hands, 'you and Joe are meant to be together!' I really, really hope so.