I turned the flimsy cardboard sign over in my fingers, remembering the thrill of first-time hotel sex, tearing each other’s clothes off as soon as we walked in the room, not even making it to the bed. But there was also the terrible afternoon we’d spent traipsing around the city in the rain, looking for the house from Dubliners, only to discover it had been knocked down years before. He’d been so annoyed, I’d tried to assuage him with a trip to a whisky distillery and given myself my worst hangover of the decade, which only annoyed him further. It was impossible to vomit subtly in a hotel bathroom. But those parts were easy to forget when I remembered the first day, spinning through the streets hand in hand, eyes only for each other, laughing and breathing and feeling so free. And did I mention the hotel sex? I would never be the same woman again.

This diary still felt new compared to some of the others in the box, the ones covered in stickers and scribbles, postcards of bands stuck to the front, whose songs I could barely remember now, but had meant everything to me once upon a time. The creamy pages were thick and lush between my fingers – total stationery porn – and my illegible handwriting looped and sloped all over the place, ballooning off the lines on some pages, slanted with the speed of my script on others. The first few entries were full to bursting, words running into each other as I documented my every thought and feeling, from meeting Patrick at some ridiculous party I’d been dragged to by my parents, to the first date, the first touch, the first kiss, the first everything else. It was all written down, the things I couldn’t say out loud, not even to Sumi or Lucy. It felt alien to me now: had I ever felt this strongly about anything? I certainly hadn’t felt even a fraction of this since we broke up. My love bled through the page with blistering vulnerability and it was almost too painful to read. Cool, composed, sophisticated, intellectual, passionate, gorgeous, bold, brave, adventurous Patrick was mine and I was ecstatic.

And then the anxiety crept in. The concerns, the worrying, the second-guessing. He cancelled a date, was he over me? He forgot we made plans, did he not care? Was I ever even good enough for him? It was a side of myself I didn’t care to be reminded of.