‘It’s been really great catching up, but I have to go into town,’ I tell them. I have already got more information than I expected.

‘Great to see you too,’ Jenny and Claire say in unison, clearly pleased that I have decided to leave.

I wave a little and then make my way across the pebbles and back onto the concrete before going up the wooden steps to the gardens above. It’s funny how everything seems smaller now that I am older. These stairs seemed never-ending when I was younger, like a ladder to the sky, which was obviously why it was called Jacob’s Ladder. Maybe it’s because my home is in the vast expanse of The Lake District and this town, this county, is so full of nooks and crannys that it’s hard to see further than a few hundred feet at any given time, unless you are looking straight out to sea.

The gardens are exactly as I remember. The small café busy as ever in these summer months. Throughout the gardens are hidden benches and there is one in particular I want to find. At school it was known as the kissing bench, because it was hidden.

I find the bench and sit on it. Names I don’t recognise are carved into the wood on every available space. I wonder if it’s even the same bench at all. It doesn’t matter though, it doesn’t matter that the names or even that the bench is different. This is the bench I had my first ever kiss on. It was a good kiss, messy and awkward but a fond memory nonetheless. I stroke the wood and feel the balance restoring inside me. I spent so long hating this place and the people here that I forget that it’s just a place. It’s just geography, nothing else. The things that made it bad were nothing to do with the trees, the coast, the pebbles on the beach, the shops or the houses. None of that was the reason I ran away. There are places I haven’t been yet because I am afraid. It’s not the places I fear though, it’s the memories that come with them. Just being here in this garden proves how much I can hide from myself. If someone had asked me just last week what the gardens looked like I could have given an overall picture, but being here has brought my memory of it to life. I can almost hear the voices of people I knew in the past and when I close my eyes I am right back there, just before my whole life fell apart.