“He’d never cared much for strawberries, but that summer her lips were so stained with the juices that they were all he tasted. And he’d never had a favourite fruit, but two years later, a new girl is sat in front of him, laughing at his jokes. “If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?” She asks playfully. And he remembers how her hands traced the veins in his neck and made their way across his chest. He remembers her soft breathing and limbs draped across his shoulders. “Strawberries.” He tells her. “I could live a life on nothing but strawberries.””

Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your bed. She tastes like a different flavor of bubblegum than you are used to. She opens up a book that you had to read in high school, and a folded picture of us falls out of chapter three. Now there are two unfinished stories resting in her lap. Inevitably, she asks, and you tell her. You say: I dated her a while back. You don’t say: Sometimes, when I’m holding you, I imagine the smell of her vanilla perfume. You say: She was younger than me. You don’t say: The sixteen summers in her bones warmed the eighteen winters my skin had weathered. You say: It’s nothing now. You don’t say: But it was everything then.