my first kiss was in a best friends bed in the dark. I must have been 13. It was so sweet and I can’t remember I forgot about it until now.

The first time I had *** was probably not long after. We used to mess around a lot and I’m not sure what you’d call it. But it happened at some point in the hazy stages of a first relationship, in a cloud of love. That was the year I received four books for my birthday, all of which I still own, one of which has come all the way to Spain with me.

My first breakup happened when I was 17, I think. There had been on and off. I like to think we still really loved each other, I don’t quite remember. The love persisted, but we faltered a little. Still saw each other and it still hurt.

We seemed to heal the hurt as we turned 18. It was then that different kinds of pain emerged in both of our lives, pain that had been bubbling for quite some time. And it hurt and we watched each other hurt, and hurt all the more because of it.

We seemed to find ourselves in separate places but the love remained, in a different, homely sort of way. We lost some family, and shared in our grief. There was always new exciting stories to tell. The patchworks of our lives expanded, always with a little room on the sides for one another to stitch in new stories from faraway places when we came home.

I just sent you a postcard. It will, no doubt, arrive from across the sea in a couple of days, smelling of seasalt and olive oil and suncream. Tucked into a pigeonhole where, when looking for a book from the library or a package from mum, you might stumble across it. I hope you smile when you read it like I smiled when writing it, the sun on my back, a city stretched out like a map under my feet.

I’m sorry that for a split second, I forgot that kiss, and had to come back to writing to remember it. My brain is funny like that. It forgets the important milestones, but carefully folds the corner of each page, tucking away the happy feelings more than the dates and times. I was always the sentimental one, you would say. The one who remembered every important day. I suppose this is my way of telling you I’m not, and I don’t. But also my way of saying that in loving you, in taking part of you with me everywhere, in having you nestled into the crevices of the person I become every day, I realised that was never the important thing.
The important thing is remembering how you feel, being proud of who you are.

Im proud of you. I’m proud of me. We’ve come so far, moved so far, and yet still hold each other dear. Those are the sorts of things a person could never forget.