I can’t believe I didn’t realize it before, that what I really wanted all along was to write to you. So that’s what I’m going to do. A memoir, perhaps. No. A confession.

Kristina, I’m waiting for you. I pray that you’ll come. I’m alone and I’m afraid for the future and I want to use this time to put everything I want to say to you into some kind of coherent account. I want to tell you everything myself, I have it all planned out in my head – you’ll come here and you’ll sit across from me and we’ll light the fire and I will start from the beginning and I won’t stop talking until there is absolutely nothing unsaid between us. If you can’t or won’t come or if something outside of my control happens to me, you’ll find what you need here. Either way, I need you to know the truth.

Let’s imagine that the story of our relationship was a novel. Writing a novel is like constructing a body from severed chunks of flesh and then magically breathing it to life, sending themes coursing through its inner framework like blood through veins. Love, empathy, obsession, jealousy, fear, grief, memory, betrayal, redemption. Which would be the main themes in our story, Kristina? I think by the time I’ve said everything I want to say, we’ll see that all of the above will jostle for space in a complex narrative in which past and present are as entwined as a body with its soul.

And which genre might such a novel fit into? My first instinct might have been that it was an unusual kind of love story, one that explores connection and vulnerability rather than romance and sex, but the boundaries between them became blurred a while ago and now they have come to seem increasingly indiscernible from one another. On second thought, just a few weeks ago, before I began to see the lines, the ones that link each occurrence in a person’s life to the next and the next, I would have called it a nihilistic reverie of sorts; meaningless fragments of lives and experiences, souped together and brought to the boil. Now, I’d be inclined to call such a novel a psychological thriller. It would contain all of the components of the genre’s best offerings – unreliable narrators, a missing woman, the dangers of love and desire, the past looming at the edges – more potent than ever, a dash of amnesia, murder. This is, of course, not a novel, though I’m finding it an interesting comparison. Like I said, it’s a confession.