By the time we got to the end of the nine months, twenty-two days and fourteen hours, my writing didn’t flow quite so freely and I’d eased up considerably on the adjectives. Just the facts, ma’am. I told him about the job offer in DC, he said I should take it, he wanted to go travelling anyway. A clean break is always for the best. No hard feelings, let’s stay in touch, yeah? And then nothing. I’d left this diary behind and given up keeping one altogether. The only record of my time in America was in photo form, tiny digital squares of memories saved on my laptop and not nearly as affecting.

A handful of photographs fell into my lap, blurry, overexposed candids, a million miles away from the pictures we took on our phones. Every photograph I took now was ruthlessly cropped, filtered and edited, and anything less than deeply flattering was immediately discarded into the digital wasteland. These were different. I leafed through them, smiling. It wasn’t that long ago but we all looked so much younger, sharper angles but softer edges. We took disposable cameras everywhere that summer, me, Sumi and Lucy, determined to break free of our phones, an ahead-of-the-curve digital detox. It lasted exactly one month until Sumi balked at the price of film development and I ran the camera we’d taken to Lucy’s hen do through the wash.

There was a rush in these photos you couldn’t get in phone pics, I realized, tracing the curve of my arm in another photo: it was slung carelessly around Patrick’s neck, my head thrown back, him holding a hand out towards the camera to wave the photographer away but still laughing. So much genuine emotion packed into one frame that I suddenly had to wonder if our ancestors had been right all along. Did the flash steal your soul? Did we give a piece of ourselves away with every selfie?

There was one photo in particular, curled at the edges and sticky on the back from a time it had taken pride of place on my wall, one photo that hit me right in the heart. It was me and Patrick at Lucy’s wedding. Lucy had given it to me, rather than keeping it for the album, it felt too personal, too intimate, to share with strangers. The sun was behind us, a bright white light sharply lining our features, and we were holding hands, eyes on each other, as though we were the only two people on earth. Our faces were inches apart, either pre- or post-kiss, I couldn’t recall, but we looked so happy. So, so happy. And three weeks after it was taken, we broke up.