Back

She turned up at 4:30 this morning, a bolt from the blue, cutting through 14 years of questions, doubt and pain as if she had never left. We didn't speak for a long time, but from the looks of things she was just as shocked to be facing me as I was to be looking into her dark blue eyes for the first time in so long. One third of my life she had been missing, and at that exact moment I fully believed that part of me had wondered where she was every single day, whether it be in my dreams forgotten in the early light of a new day or deep in my subconscious; a thought battling away to be recognised but suppressed by mechanisms built up over the years to make me forget her.

It was all back now though.

The blocks my mind had constructed meticulously, burying memories and locking away urges and feelings had been shattered as soon as I opened the door, and now that the dam was broken everything I had worked so hard to suppress was now flooding my consciousness, screaming at me and filling me with memories of kisses, walks, lovemaking. As I staggered back under the onslaught I found it difficult to breathe, and while it was symptomatic of a panic attack, I knew that I was drowning.

She looked at me and smiled, before handing me the pack of cigarettes she had gone out for all those years ago.