The Lovely Thing About Being Noticed

There are compliments I have forgotten completely.

And then there are the ones that have somehow stayed with me for years.

Not always because they were grand. Often because they arrived unexpectedly, from somebody who had noticed something about me that I hadn’t realised they were paying attention to.

Ste opened the car door for me on our first date.

Two weeks into knowing me, he bought me an emerald green bracelet.

He once had a cake made in the shape of a KitKat Chunky because that’s how we met. After our first date, he decorated the bedroom with petals and tea lights. He proposed in exactly the sort of way I would have wanted.

And once, during a period when he’d managed to see me every single day for two weeks, there was one day when it looked as though he wouldn’t.

So instead, he walked me the fifteen minutes to my friend’s house.

Just to prove he’d still found a way.

Michael once phoned every Garvey in the phone book until he found the right house, just so he could get my number and ask me out.

Mike, who I knew through the NHS, bought me Singapore orchids once.

My favourite.

He said I deserved to have flowers.

I bought him a Mars bar in return.

Anthony was someone I’d quietly had a crush on and never told anyone about.

One Halloween, I turned up at the bar where he worked dressed as a witch and eventually worked up the courage to write my number on a napkin.

He came over.

“Hey, Francine.”

I was genuinely surprised he remembered my name.

“I’d never forget a pretty face,” he said.

There are sentences that aren’t particularly original until the person saying them is the person you secretly hoped might notice you.

Jon once put a sticker on my bedroom mirror.

You’re beautiful.

He told me he’d left me a present and that I should go and look.

And there it was.

My own reflection, with those words staring back at me.

The sticker stayed.

So did the memory.

Another man I was seeing once picked flowers straight from the grass as he was leaving and handed them to me on his way out.

No florist.

No occasion.

Just flowers he’d seen and decided I should have.

Jamie and I shared a taxi home one night.

I dropped him off first and, as he climbed out, he stopped and said:

“You know what’s so nice about you, Francine? You don’t know just how good-looking you are.”

Then he closed the door and disappeared.

I remember sitting there afterwards with that sentence.

Not because somebody had told me I was attractive.

I’d been told that before.

It was the you don’t know part.

The idea that perhaps other people sometimes see something in us that we genuinely don’t.

Once, I was sitting in a pub with five friends when a man called Danny walked straight over to our table.

He confidently said hello to every single person sitting there.

Then he asked me my name.

He told me he’d been watching me laughing from across the room and had felt so drawn to my personality that he had to come over.

His confidence was astonishing.

I gave him my number immediately.

We then spent the rest of the evening texting each other from opposite sides of the same pub.

Zed once put my name in the college Valentine’s magazine.

A public declaration to the entire college that he had a crush on me.

I hadn’t known.

There was something wonderfully vulnerable about that.

Someone deciding that instead of privately thinking something lovely about you, they were simply going to say it.

Out loud.

Or, in this case, in print.

There have been lots of these moments.

Flowers.

Perfume brought back from a trip.

Someone admitting they’d always fancied me.

A row of schoolboys once singing “I love you, Franny” at me for reasons I still don’t entirely understand.

Tiny things.

Ridiculous things.

Romantic things.

Things that lasted a second and things I can still remember decades later.

And I think I’ve finally worked out why some of them stayed.

It isn’t because I needed men to tell me I was attractive.

I didn’t.

And I don’t think the nicest compliments are really about attractiveness anyway.

They’re about being noticed.

Someone remembering which flowers you love.

Someone watching you laugh across a crowded pub.

Someone noticing that you don’t quite see yourself the way they see you.

Someone finding a tiny flower in the grass and thinking, She’d like that.

There is something deeply human about being seen.

Not assessed.

Not approved of.

Just noticed.

I think we sometimes become so wary of needing validation that we forget this.

There is nothing weak about enjoying somebody saying something lovely about you.

There is nothing wrong with your face lighting up because another person has gone out of their way to make it happen.

You can know exactly who you are and still enjoy being reflected beautifully in somebody else’s eyes.

Perhaps that’s why Jon’s sticker stayed on my mirror for so long.

Not because I needed it to tell me I was beautiful.

But because once, somebody had looked at me and thought something lovely.

And instead of keeping it to himself, he made sure I knew.

Maybe that’s why compliments stay with us.

They don’t tell us who we are.

They simply hold up a mirror for a moment and say:

I noticed this about you.

And sometimes, years later, you realise you’re still carrying the reflection.