Eventually we ended up spending a lot of time together, getting into the types of mischief you can only get away with at uni, the types of mischief your fresh air and natural-light-starved brain thinks is OK. And University Mia was a great Mia. She was a Mia that used to go to children’s playgrounds on the way home from a night out and spend hours on the wobbly horse thing, yelling to everybody and nobody that she was a princess and we should bow down to her. She was a Mia that didn’t mind being a drunken kleptomaniac, making me help her haul home an actual human-sized martini glass – the ones dancers sit in during the risqué nightclub scene in movies. We couldn’t get it through the front door, no matter what angles we tried, so we left it in the middle of a roundabout. But my fondest memories are of the random conversations we would have on the stairs. We would have stopped for a short hello, but two hours would pass without a goodbye. The more awkward the location, the longer the catch-up.

And she is my biggest cheerleader. I guess this is why her words hurt so much. Her support was something I thought I could always count on, but now I’m not so sure.

And it hurts.

The one thing I keep replaying in my head, the one thing I can’t get away from, is how she said I never fight for anything.

And I keep having this niggling feeling that she is right.

I’m not too sure when it happened, but if I’m brutally honest with myself (which I’m often not, and instead tend to procrastinate when it comes to self-evaluation, probably out of fear of what I will see there), I find it easier to remove myself from any kind of area of competition rather than take what feels like constant defeat. Defeat in my work life, defeat in my love life, even defeat in my living situation. So instead I’ve given up.

Mia is right. I don’t fight. And I am hiding.

I hide behind a smile, I hide behind a joke, I hide behind my own front door.

But I shouldn’t. As mundane as the task was, helping Emily felt good. So maybe I shouldn’t feel bad that I’m not the star sales exec this year. Maybe instead I should feel good about the contributions I can and do make, at work and everywhere else. Everyone has a role, I just need to figure out what my role is and start to play it.

Maybe my pathetic outburst on New Year’s Eve, my resolution to date, was the right sentiment but the wrong action. I don’t need to date. I need to do things that make me happy.

‘Hugo, this is it!’ His head picks up from the bramble he’s sniffing, and he looks back at me with his big wide eyes and pure face, clearly picking up from the tone of my voice that something big is about to happen. ‘I’m gonna get off my arse and start doing shit.’ I do a mini fist-pump in the air, glad that nobody is around to see.