Falling in love was my first mistake, and my favourite. Out of all the beautiful and terrifying things in this beautiful and terrifying world, you were always my favourite. Because sometimes you find someone in the place you would least expect to find them, and you realise that they are everything you never knew you needed. You were everything I never knew I needed and there was never a day I didn't live for your smile. There was a life before you and there will be a life after you – which I painfully admit. But they are not times worth thinking about or remembering, now that I have you in my rather insignificant but wholly techni-coloured life, I realise that my being before you was mere existing. A lifeless song. I had no reason to live, no reason to die or breathe or think or feel in the way that I do now. Oh, to think of all that I didn't know I was missing.

Meeting you was the best and worst thing that ever could have happened to me, and I speak with colossal truth when I say that I couldn't be happier for it. It was like one of those simply confounding moments when you see someone on the train, and you lock eyes and fall vicariously in love for a mere three minutes before one of you departs and you both tragically, and yet non-surprisingly, forget the enchanted meeting ever occurred. Except I never departed, never forgot and my gaze never left yours, even though, in the many-keyed commotion, yours left mine.

Before you, I had been unknowingly smashed in pieces, had been a drifter dozing in and out of existence like a baby with sleep. I was safe in my old, warm world and felt no need to form attachment – it would only hold me down. But then I saw you. You little happy ending nestled in a mother's arms. You were an intimate revelation. It was like having a bucket of semi-precious ice thrown over me, leaving me stripped and new and paralysed, pockets bursting with tickets of admission to my newly fated doom. Your hourglass eyes saw mine, that is no lie, and for a moment or two of trembling abnormality, you looked over at me from your mother's mountainous arms. And then you did something of a particular wonder. You understood and you accepted it all. You accepted me, dusty soul and all. You saw me for what I didn't know I was and it felt like all life within me was only just beginning. And then the rusty, ragged edge of fate cut me a new one and made you blink and forget, like all others inexplicably do. So you turned back your little head and left me alone in the shadows of my intricate madness. You caught me and then you stranded me. You made yourself my home. I had nowhere to run but to you.

They all told me I was insane, that I was filling up with foolishness for watching you, for dreaming of things I would never have... a life I could never possibly hope to lead. There were meetings and arguments and they demanded I say things I couldn't even whisper. They didn't understand what it was that I felt, they didn't even try. Honestly, even I didn't understand my mysterious and melancholy affliction – but that didn't mean it disappeared. I was told to turn back, but I only knew that I had to carry on. I knew in my core that there was an embrace of sunlight at the end of the eternally dark tunnel. There had to be, there simply had to be.