I wondered if that was a sign that my memory was already going.

The next morning the sun beat down on me and I woke up sweaty and unrested. There were no curtains or blinds yet and I lay uncomfortably for a few minutes until the smell from my own armpits insisted I shower. At some point around the fourteenth rehash of the argument and the millionth time I considered texting Ruby, I decided I was not going to fall apart. This wasn’t like with Hannah. There was no investment. We were only having fun. It did not hurt. I was not going to be a pathetic mess. I remembered pathetic-mess Saoirse. She was the reason I didn’t do relationships to begin with.

After Hannah, I cried in bed. I cried in the toilets at school. I cried at the dinner table and on the walk home from school. I sent texts to her that made my cringe glands almost explode, things like I still love you, What can I do to fix this, and Did you ever love me? At first, she would answer immediately with some guff about wanting to be friends, and then it took longer and longer and I began to imagine what she was doing in the time it took her to reply. I stalked her Instagram and Facebook. For a while I tried to be her friend and show her that she could still love me. I’d end up saying something needy or bring up in-jokes from our relationship to try to remind her of how good we were together. She would smile sadly and change the subject. I cried to Izzy over and over, and bored her to tears, asking questions like Did she say anything about me? Do you think we’ll get back together? Is she seeing someone else? All before I found out she’d known all along that Hannah was planning to break up with me, of course. That’s when I cut them both off. I only wished I’d done it immediately and spared myself the humiliation.

That girl broke me, and I wasn’t going to go through it again.

What if I did get the dementia and my stupid brain decided to pick this year to be stuck in, the way Mum thought she was young? If I moped around about Ruby I could be stuck in post-breakup depression forever.

Had the montage experiment worked out? Not exactly. We technically had four weeks left but what did it matter? We’d have broken up then anyway. I had more time to prepare for whatever was coming next. I wasn’t going to dwell on the past. Even if the past was yesterday.