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I’m 12 years old, I start secondary school. Boys still see girls as yucky and are still in the hair pulling stage. So imagine my surprise when I meet a boy who is nice to me and talks to me normally. He doesn’t tease me. My 12 year old brain falls in childish love. Dan is his name. We go bowling once. It’s the thing to do when you’re 12. I’m too scared to kiss him, due to chronic shyness. The love affair is over. I write in my diary my feelings of woe.

Fast forward 10 years. I meet Dan again, we email, we chat, we meet up once, go driving around in his car, and then we kiss. He’s in a band, he has dreads – I find him very attractive, probably because he’s so totally unlike me. We never had a relationship, it’s more a series of trivial encounters that meant more to me than to him. He is surrounded by friends, and female attention, he doesn’t need me. Over the years contact becomes erratic, and here I am now, at 25, not knowing where he is or what he’s doing (although I do know he’s still in a band).

I had a dream about him last night. It’s the second one in a month. And I still think about him, in a vague kind of way, even though nothing ever really happened between us. He refuses to budge, even though I’m engaged to someone else now.

I have a theory. Familiarity feels safe, and I’ve been going on the internet a lot lately, looking up toys and TV programmes I enjoyed when I was little. I think I’m looking for security via my past. Hence Dan, who was my first infatuation, and was present all through my adolescence. We hardly ever spoke at school after the bowling incident but for some reason my brain has latched on to him. It’s odd. I haven’t actually seen him in a few years now.

Damn it. If I was better at writing I could have said all of this much better……