A few days later we stood in my old school’s home economics kitchen with four straight couples in their thirties gazing adoringly at each other, sparkling rings blinding us from the left hand of each of the women, and one seriously old man on his own. Ruby nudged me when she saw him and made a sad face, so we took the bench behind the old man. It was us and him on one side of the room and the loving couples on the other.

Being in school was weird. It had the eerie abandoned feeling of summer, but it struck me that it was probably the last time I’d ever be in this building properly, unless you counted when I picked up my results. I hadn’t thought about it on the last day of school, maybe because I knew we’d be back in the exam hall in a couple of weeks or maybe because I was concentrating on how much I wanted the bell to ring so I could leave.

Everyone had been running around the halls spraying silly string and getting their shirts signed in permanent marker. I just wanted to get out of there, finish my studying, and avoid the friends I’d already left behind. As I was walking down the steps to the front gates, I spied Izzy from the corner of my eye. She was holding a Sharpie and I had a feeling she was going to ask me to sign her shirt even though we hadn’t spoken in months. That’s the kind of person she was. The sentimentality of the day would make her think we could somehow make it up. But I spotted Dad in the car park and practically sprinted to the door. I wasn’t mad at her anymore. I had been angry with my friend who’d known I was going to get my heart broken and didn’t tell me. But Izzy wasn’t my friend anymore and I simply didn’t care. I didn’t want to be rude and refuse to sign, but I also didn’t want to sign and pretend that I would look back fondly on memories of us, as if the last eight months had never happened.

Relationships change and the past isn’t some static thing you could keep forever like a photograph. No one else seems to understand that. Just because something happened, it doesn’t mean it will mean the same thing to you forever. It changes with you. The friendship you cherished, the wife you adored, the child you raised. It can all become meaningless so easily, which means it was always meaningless from the beginning and you just didn’t realize it.

But if everything is meaningless, you might as well have as good a time as you possibly can.