People told me how great I looked, over and over and over again. Every compliment fed me like lunch.

Real life was always a disappointment because the narrative of romance in my head was completely unattainable.

Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.

Morrissey once described his teenage life as “waiting for a bus that never came”;

I blame my high expectations for love on two things: the first is that I am the child of parents who are almost embarrassingly infatuated with each other; the second is the films I watched in my formative years.

“It may seem that life is difficult at times but it’s really as simple as breathing in and out,” she read. “Rip open hearts with your fury and tear down egos with your modesty. Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you are doomed to be. Let yourself run away with your feelings. You were made so that someone could love you.

It was as if, when things didn’t go as I imagined, I’d assumed he would have been given a copy of the script I’d written and I’d feel frustrated that his agent obviously forgot to courier it to him to memorize.

All topics and opinions will be broad, noncommittal, and predictable, with made-up statistics and exaggerated personal anecdotes to support flimsy arguments.

I am just a heap of frayed and half-finished thoughts; of blood and muscle and skin and bone and unachievable dreams and a stack of shit teenage poetry under my bed.