I’m not good when I’m out of my comfort zone. When I couldn’t sleep over summer, and my heart was beating fast with fear about moving, I would watch old sitcoms, like Friends and New Girl and How I Met Your Mother, to reassure myself. This is what it will be like living with other people. We’ll be instant best friends. I’ll be different from the person I have always been, because no one will know anything about me. I’ll be free to rewrite my own character, pretend I have a whole team of people giving me great dialogue and lots of plot and a roster of romantic entanglements. We’ll have dinner parties and watch horror movies and sit up talking all night, have picnics in parks and start a netball team and go to concerts and restaurants and art galleries. And I’ll be a runner (in these fantasies, I’m always very fit), and good at yoga and playing goal attack in netball. I won’t worry about anything, because I won’t need to: I’ll be too busy and happy and successful.

But now it can’t be like that, not with Jesse here, his very presence reminding me who I was, who I am.

I used to spend a lot of my Saturday nights sitting with Nanna and her cat, Minty, watching British crime dramas while simultaneously creating to-do lists, study plans, meal ideas, tracking books I want to read and the books I have read, and analysing my sleep, exercise, study time, screen time from the previous week, logging it all into my apps and spreadsheets, making graphs, observing progress. It was a soothing ritual, having the numbers, knowing the data, seeing where I’ve been and where I’m going. I felt better being in control of everything.

I have always been the friend who remembered all the birthdays and organised the group present and paid for it and nervously and politely chased everyone else for their share of the money. I was the helper, the doer, the bringer of positive energy. I was the designated driver, the guarder-of-drinks, the holder-back-of-hair, the minder-of-bags, the lookout-for-parents, the one keeping track of who went where with who and how drunk they might be and when I should check on them.