New at romance? I wanted to laugh. I’d been studying romance like an academic. Like an obsessive researcher. Romance would be my Mastermind topic

I think the perfect marriage would be made up of two people who can sit in comfortable silence with each other for extended periods of time

It was so easy to romanticise romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was in falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laughter, shoes lined up together by the door. Eyes across a dance floor

Give your friendships the magic you would give a romance. Because they’re just as important. Actually, for us, they’re way more important

Like the way friendship can be just as intense, beautiful and endless as romance. Like the way there’s love everywhere around me – there’s love for my friends, there’s love in my paintings, there’s love for myself

I was angry at the world for making me hate who I was

Maybe they wouldn’t be real in most people’s minds. But I could make them real in mine. I could do whatever the fuck I wanted. I whispered them sometimes under my breath, until they felt like a magic spell. Pictured them as I fell asleep

And the worst part of it was – even though I’d longed for these things, I knew that they’d never make me happy anyway. The idea was beautiful. But the reality made me sick