I want you to ruin my life. Take the weak, thumping jelly of my heart and just… fucking… eat it. Yank it out of my body and hold it high in both your hands and laugh as you sink in your teeth. I want you to ruin my life.

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I don’t sleep in our bedroom any more, I decamped to the spare room months ago. There are too many ghosts in our bedroom now, I do not like being in it. The room in which my ex-boyfriend used to work (and play, and sleep, and live) has long since been closed off: I use the space for drying laundry, but the door to it is firmly shut unless I’m hanging socks. This house is riddled with shadow-versions of him, and most of them congregate in there.

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We’re sitting on the balcony in the candlelight, at two o’clock in the morning: my ex and I. And I do not say any of the things I want to say, because there’s no point saying them now. We chat and laugh and are gentle with each other, and he smells really good and he’s beautiful. So I don’t say ‘what the fuck’ or ‘Jesus Christ’ or ‘mate, I fucking loved you.’ When you hang out with your ex, there are certain things you’re just not meant to say.

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I used to yo-yo break up with my ex-ex. Number eight. The guy I met at university and loved for many years (whose dark dark eyes and devious filth you can read about in my first book if you’re interested). We had our problems, but we also had our passion. Long, tortured silences in the middle of arguments that would stretch on for what felt like hours, while each of us rummaged in our equally-wordy minds for the perfect phrase that would lift the blanket of sadness. But words can’t always do the work: sometimes, most times, the physical yearning would beat our mouths to the punch, and one of us would reach out to touch the other. That touch would set us both on fire, then we’d fuck like the fucking would fix it.

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The first time my heart was broken – and I say this with a fairly solid definition of what heartbreak feels like for me, and how it’s different to a simple, everyday hurt – it felt like the world was going to end. There was too much emotion to hold inside my fragile body, and it stayed for so long that I couldn’t conceive of the possibility that one day it wouldn’t be there any more. This heartbreak – puny and pathetic now I come to think about it – was caused by the wandering, horny eye of an eighteen-year-old boy.

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