I remember the very first time I saw her, the day Ruth came into focus in my life. It is so strange that this was over a decade ago: I can feel how I felt for her then even though I feel none of it now. Maybe she joined the college later in the academic year or maybe it took a while for me to pick her out of the swarm; Ruth is incredibly talented at blending in. It was in the middle of winter, close to Christmas. I watched her through the glitter frost on the glass pane: a little thing in a white smock and no coat. She wore a large scarf – a misshapen, handmade wrap – and kept her fingers knitted into the folds to fasten it at the chest. She looked cold, all pinks and blues and whites, and very small, like a winter flower. A late bloomer, I thought, and I laughed at my own joke. (I tried to keep myself in good spirits. No one I worked with had a sense of humour.) The girl swiped herself through the gates of the ugly grey block of student halls beside the university and then disappeared inside and that was it.

From then on I saw her exactly four times a day, all during work hours. Once in the morning on her way to lectures. Once around lunchtime, on her way back to her student halls. Once on her way into Tesco. Once on her way out from Tesco. The regularity of those outings immediately struck a chord. Here was this small, clueless thing ploughing through life, while all around her two hundred young nurses spent most of their time idling, sneaking out to smoke outside the school gates, applying make-up in hand-held mirrors while walking to the lecture hall, skipping seminars to hang out with boys behind the chemistry department.

She alone had a timetable to stave off the chaos. She went about her tasks definitively, easily, like she’d been doing this for years, even though she must only just have moved out of her parents’ house. She looked so young. Yet her behaviour resonated with me like a shared fate: week-a-page diaries and errands and long hours sitting behind desks with one key difference: what appeared to suit her nature so perfectly made me feel trapped.