Last night I dreamt that someone came knocking at my door at 6 am in the morning. I noticed the greying strands of hair across my shoulders. Turning towards the mirror, I saw the sagging eyelids, the wrinkled skin hanging in folds around the corners of my mouth. My breath held itself back for a second. I suddenly remembered that I'm not seventeen but seventy. It was as if my body had more control over me than my own 'self', as if I had learned to recognise myself separate from it.

The girl who knocked at my door asked me how much of my life I remembered even now. The apples of her young cheeks grew red with excitement when I finally uttered your name. I felt my heart swell up with joy at the thought of you too, at the thought that you were the first. It was the thought of you being the first one to put up with all the stubborn, tantrums of the naive, seventeen-year old, the first to share the punch of anger and the touch of warm secrets, the first to hear the raising and lowering of voices, spilling out thoughts off the top of our heads fearlessly, recklessly through sunsets and sunrises along with the endless silences our adolescent pride imposed on us through months. I felt the hair on my knuckles stand at the excitement rushing through me at the thought of you, as if time had stagnated for a couple of seconds, as if you would walk back into my life unabashed like this thought, until a snap of fingers and the young girl's voice pulled me out of my reverie. "Tell me everything you remember!" she shrieked, and in the exact next moment the excitement sank to the bottom of my gut with a loud thud, the loudness of which no one else could discern. I felt the grin on my face crawl back into the folds of the wrinkles, sagging my mouth, as I realised that I carried nothing else with me into my seventieth year, as I realised that the only thing I remembered of myself was you.