I remembered running away here as a teenager, with the first love of my life, and coming-to outside the next morning. The girl and the money were both gone, and she’d written a Dear John letter on my left hand in red biro.

The pavements were blocks of ice under my feet, and I could feel the cold through the soles of my shoes. I thought about the past ... The terrifying blackouts of my youth. I thought about never seeing my sister again. I thought about [girl]. First scared, then alone, then dead.

The truth is that she was a cruel kind of beautiful. Someone you might remember on your deathbed, wondering where your courage had been on the day you met, wondering why your courage only ever surfaced at the wrong time and for people who weren’t worth it.

I watched [her] from the window, my hand pressing hard into the glass. There should be a word for it. That phantom limb, reaching out from your chest, towards things you’ll never have. She crossed the road with wide, lovely strides, and I always wonder what she went on to. The last shred of sunlight caught her hair when she turned the corner, like the start of one thing and the end of another. The dusk itself. I never saw her again.

There was always an edge of performance with [girl], but when I think of her, when I think of the real her, I think of that night. Her hair up, that jacket, that skirt, that conflict. I felt the second drink working on me. Putting the beat back into the music, the shine back on every surface. I didn’t know what she was thinking. I didn’t know what she was trying to say. I never really got to know her.

... she was impossible not to look at, impossible not to love. She moved through the party like an aura, and even the places she’d been and gone from held something of her radiance, her afterglow.

All I knew was where it had started, a year before. The three strikes against me and all the reasons I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t have explained the girls, the women, who had briefly entered my life. Briefly changed it. [He] wouldn’t have understood their laughs, their indignations, their secrets. For the rest of the night my eyes drifted to the people on the street, the girls, the women, and I felt like I was seeing the lives they wouldn’t live.