I missed her in every conceivable way. I missed waking on a Saturday morning with her head buried in the crook of my neck. I missed giggling over a glass of wine, Fleetwood Mac whispering to us from a record player. I missed our laughter. I missed our fights. I missed her silent apologies, unspoken, in the form of a soft kiss and a shared cigarette. I missed looking into her eyes and seeing my reflection clearly—she, the only one who ever saw the me that lived inside of me. I missed having sex anywhere and everywhere and the reckless thrill that we might be caught serving only to fuel our voracious lust. I missed her safety, her warmth. I missed the person I was when I was with her; the best of me that only she brought out.

The one thing I found myself incapable of doing was casting aside the necklace Connie bought me. It continued to dangle from my neck, something to fumble with in times of anxiety or upset. Almost instinctively I would find myself reaching for it at various points throughout the day, hanging, always, over my shirt.

When Orla was busy with our old friends, I spent most of my shifts sitting behind the counter with my headphones on listening to new mixtapes I made over the summer. My old ones—boxes upon boxes of tapes—sat collecting dust on a shelf in my bedroom. My music taste didn’t change but I certainly had, and after a few weeks, I decided to cease torturing myself by playing music strung together because it was inspired or made by Connie O’Reilly and began to build up a new collection from scratch. Every single song I enjoyed bore some kind of connection to a memory we shared together, or the lyrics reminded me of her, or forced me to think about her because I liked it and she hated it. I stopped listening to The Cure. I put my Joy Division poster in a box and hid my Smiths T-shirt at the back of my wardrobe. I hunted down new music that could have nothing to do with Connie and repeated it on a loop until I found myself almost liking it, and put together new mixtapes to pass away some time. Music was my refuge and even in those lonely, uninspiring days it provided me with invaluable company, my nameless, faceless friend.

I listened to music at work and very often failed to notice when a customer came in, even as they stood right in front of me coughing and waving, tapping on the counter. On a lazy, rainy afternoon in late August I was three songs into my new Rolling Stones mixtape when the unmistakable sound of a girl clearing her throat forced me to open my eyes and look up.

“Well, if it isn’t Alex Ryan.”

“Julia?” I smiled—perhaps my first genuine smile in months. “Hey—long time no see. I mean—a year, or something, since Aidan’s party. How—how are you?