Tristan was also good at romance. Or maybe not good, but enthusiastic. He wrote me a poem once, which on the surface sounds like a beautiful gesture. But when he handed it to me to read in front of him, I felt my soul briefly leave my body. Reading a poem in front of the person who had written it for me was my worst nightmare, I suddenly realised. And Tristan didn’t even like English, he was a science and maths nerd. Whenever I talked about books, he would remind me that he read The Lord of the Rings every year, or he said he did, although sometimes he just watched the movies instead. That was the extent of his involvement in literature. But maybe he was a poet. I don’t know who gets to decide these things. I also don’t know how you know if a poem is any good, but I didn’t want to try to figure that out while someone was watching me.

I thought maybe the poem would rhyme, and be sweet and fun. My darling Brooke, my heart swells at just a look—something like that. I could enjoy that.

The poem wasn’t rhyming.

I read it, twice, in respectful silence, and then looked up at him. I still remember it, line for line.

The sky, limp and grey

The ground, damp and hard

My life, plain like an empty field

And then you came along

And made my buds bloom.

He was leaning forward, his face open, excited to hear what I think.

‘I love it,’ I said, swallowing and smiling hard.

‘I thought you would,’ he said.

I didn’t love it.

I loved that he’d written it for me. No, that’s not true either. I wanted to love that he’d written it for me. I definitely appreciated that he’d written it for me. Some people will go through their whole lives without someone writing a romantic poem for them and now I could tick that box off, nice and early.

There were just so many words in it that I didn’t like. Specifically, the word limp. And the word damp right near the word hard. And I definitely wish I had never seen the word buds in there. I made his buds bloom. It’s a very aggressive image. Especially when you factor in that I had touched the penis of the person who wrote it.

And it was just printed on regular A4 paper. Arial font, size 12, left aligned at the top of the page. Then his name and, for some absurd reason, the copyright symbol after it.