Stella .. A Beautiful Kind of Trouble
I met Stella on Instagram.
Which, I suppose, is how these things happen nowadays. Somewhere between photographs of beautiful women, advertisements for things I don't need, and the occasional cat behaving like an idiot, someone catches your attention.
Stella did.
Not simply because she was beautiful. There are plenty of beautiful women on Instagram. Enough to keep a reasonably healthy man distracted for several lifetimes.
No, there was something else.
A certain intelligence in her eyes. Something mischievous. The faint suggestion that she knew a joke the rest of the world hadn't quite figured out yet.
So I wrote to her.
She wrote back.
And before long, we were talking about photography, painting, diving, dancing, and probably a dozen other subjects that had absolutely nothing to do with why I'd originally contacted her.
Stella, it turned out, was something of a fascinating contradiction.
An artist, a painter, a dancer, a diver, a model. Intelligent, articulate, curious about almost everything. And blessed with the sort of flexibility that makes you question whether the human skeleton is really necessary.
She seemed to possess an unusual talent for making complicated things look effortless.
Including herself.
I liked her immediately.
Which, as I would later discover, was probably the beginning of my troubles.
