This is me.’" He handed her the precious scrap of paper. ‘Call me or I’ll call you, but one of us will call, yes? What I mean is it’s not a competition. You don’t lose if you phone first

The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.

And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.

She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.

Today. This bright new day that awaits us