The day after the break up, Mum took me to a farm shop an hour’s drive away because there aren’t many places in Lancashire that can cheer you up after something like that.

The sky was the colour of porridge, and I hadn’t eaten in a day. Toast had only gathered on my tongue like spit – tasteless and stubborn. The antique shop next door was closed so we wandered through the food hall instead, looking at expensive meat and rows of organic fruit arranged by colour, their skins wrinkled in pity. 

I hid behind my oversized sunglasses, hands half-covering my face, looking like Hailey Bieber in that video when she tried to avoid the paparazzi but ended up walking into a wall. The smell of olives and cheese gave me an odd sense of comfort even though I liked the taste of neither. My senses felt tangled in one tight knot, my legs moving without me as if I was wearing the wrong trousers in Wallace and Gromit. 

I walked in a daze, unable to think about anything except my own pain.

I lifted my chin at the pies, refused free samples, and pushed my lips into a pout, hoping people might notice my tragic state. When I left the food hall, I felt even worse than when I’d entered. Looking back, I’m unsure whether this was because the woman at the till didn’t ask why I looked so sad, or that the nine-hundred day Snapchat streak with my now-ex had finally disappeared. 

We had added each other on 27th August 2022 and I called it our ‘Acknowledging Each Other’s Existence Day.’ I was in Preston, eating a Greggs sandwich, watching sixth formers dressed in Nike tracksuits wielding their bikes outside the McDonalds, when the notification appeared. His Bitmoji wore a Santa hat even though it was summer, and glasses he didn’t even own. He asked me what I was doing that week, and I told him I was flying to New York to speak at the United Nations. I felt rather pleased with myself as I typed it. I can’t recall his exact reply, but I do remember feeling cool and serious, wandering through Matalan in search of a new blouse for my panel speech, feeling that tickling suspicion of a crush begin to show itself.

It was now March 2025. Mum and I headed upstairs to a coffee shop and I melted into a vinyl sofa. Soon after, I noticed an elderly woman with a wonky bob staring at me. I wanted to glare back, but didn’t feel like I was in a position to remove my sunglasses. My eyes were swollen like Bear Grylls’ after he got stung by that bee in the desert, and my lips were cracked from all my soap-opera lamentations. 

Instead, I opened a new book: Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I’d bought it ages ago after working through an alphabetical list of twentieth-century poets, falling down a rabbit hole when I reached George Barker, with whom Smart had a long, passionate, riddling affair. She intrigued me far more than he ever could, so I skipped the rest of the alphabet and jumped straight to S. 

Her lyric novel is a tableau of suffering and yearning. It sat heavy on my lap like a bruise. I soon found that her poetry gave me something real to cling onto when all my own words felt as useless as the unripe food hall fruit. Her pain made me feel like I was not alone. 

Smart wrote that she felt “shot with wounds which have eyes that see a world all sorrow, always to be, panoramic and unspeakable, and mouths that hang unspeakable in the sky of blood.” 

Despite its intensity, her writing gave me a strange kind of reassurance and made me feel a bit better about myself.

Our food arrived quickly. Mum had ordered me a jacket potato and a latte, served in one of those glass cups with a handle that I hate. The potato skin was burnt and tasted like wet paper. Mum ate while scrolling through Facebook in search of some bad local gossip that might make me smile, and once I finished my salad, I returned to my book, all while the bob lady watched me from the beige sofa that sagged beneath her like an undercooked quiche. 

Afterwards, Mum suggested that we stop off at a garden centre so I could buy a card for Carol, the family friend my ex-boyfriend lived with, and who let me stay over whenever I visited. I remember we would spend hours talking about politics, I’m a Celebrity, and the stories behind the paintings in her cottage. She grew up in Kenya and survived polio. I thought she was brilliant and I knew I would miss her terribly. 

I agreed to this second trip. It felt like a better option than going home, curling into a foetal position, watching teary-eyed Grant trying to defend cheating on Ashley on Temptation Island, spending hours wondering why I wasn’t worth fighting for. 

On the way there, I thought a lot about Elizabeth Smart. How she fell in love with the “juicy sound” of Barker’s poetry before she even met him, how she surrendered to this self-inflating infatuation, how she was utterly determined to marry him and enlisted Lawrence Durrell’s help to arrange their first correspondence.

My ex-boyfriend was a poet, but it often felt performative. He seemed to write to impress, rather than explore thoughts and images that basic language failed to hold. When he wrote about me, it was never as a whole or singular being. Akin to Virginia Woolf’s idea that women serve as looking-glasses that “reflect the figure of the man at twice its natural size,” he used to call me his mirror, and one time, a jewel through which “all his goodness” shone through. I was always a muse, a magician’s trick, bending my own image to enhance his own. 

He seemed to compliment me only if the words fit his rhyme scheme.

On Halloween 2022, over a plate of salmon tagliatelle, he asked me to be his girlfriend with a poem. I was probably talking about how tagliatelle would make a nice name for a girl without the implications, like chlorophyll or Germolene. After reading his words, my eyes pink with promise, I said yes. I remember returning home feeling different and wanted, falling asleep smiling, pleased with the title I had quietly longed to hold for years: girlfriend. His poetic affection floating behind my eyes like pastel lanterns.  

A few days later, when I was still too nervous for him to see me without makeup, I woke up to find a cloud of mascara around my eyes and a new sweeping fringe, looking like Jenny Humphrey in Gossip Girl. I tucked my hair behind my ear, grabbed one of those stubborn man hairbrushes that can never untangle knots, and muttered that I looked like death.

Half-asleep, he said, “If death looked like you then nobody would be scared of it.”

I looked scary as I walked into this garden centre. Even the automatic doors were unwilling to open for me, as if I were a ghost. Tadpoles of snot gathered at my sleeves, and my nose shone redder than a traffic light. His words returned to me as I skimmed through the Happy Anniversary cards, and I realised that the last one I’d bought for him still lay blank and flat on my desk like a dead butterfly.

For I hadn’t written him a card or bought him a present for our two-year anniversary. One week before I was due to travel to London to see him, a mutual friend sent me his Tinder profile. Looking for Short-Term Fun was written underneath a photo of him holding a pint, smiling the way he used to when he stood at my door with flowers. I had opened the Instagram message, the screenshot attached, my eyes still heavy with the residue of sleep, and convinced myself it was someone pretending to be him. 

Until I realised he had never posted that first photo before.

Addison Rae’s song Aquamarine was released that October day, and in a scene that mirrored the trip to the garden centre, I remember sitting in the car on the way to the Trafford Centre wearing the same oversized sunglasses, feeling seized by a new kind of betrayal. I listened to the song on repeat until the beat fizzed in my ears, hoping it would drown out my thoughts.

I tried to watch my dad and sister on their indoor skydiving course. Tried to film them spinning inside the giant cylinder with their arms spread like flying squirrels. But sitting behind the glass, I could only stare at the profile screenshot on my phone, my thumb hovering over the keyboard, trying to press ‘send’ on the message that read: “Care to explain this?”

In that moment, I knew I would never be able to look into his iodine-coloured eyes in the same way again. When he hugged me outside Euston Station after begging me to still visit, I felt as though I were holding an inflatable man, my cheek pressed against something that felt more like plastic than skin. His litany of apologies was followed by a mushroom risotto in a restaurant next to the London Eye, where he spent most of the evening talking about his friend Gwilym. He asked me to forgive him, and I did. But as I sat across from him, I realised I no longer recognised the boy in a cable knit jumper, the one who passed me a poem in the candlelight, and I was no longer the cool, serious girl I had once been in Matalan.

I felt like a fool. I didn’t even like mushrooms.

Elizabeth Smart and George Barker never married, yet they had four children, all of whom she raised alone. He fathered eleven more children with three other women and was seldom sober. But she never named and blamed him in her book, never used the page as a space to spill her rage, never showed any inklings of self-pity or regret. The pain was worth it because she had experienced love. And so, after her book’s publication, she did not write any more literature for thirty years. 

I wouldn’t call her a fool for loving him for over a decade, and I didn’t want to call myself one either. I didn’t want to blame myself for staying. I wanted to hold on to the belief that we were both strong for loving someone longer than we probably should have.