Two dozen pink carnations arrived at my house on Valentine’s Day. It was the 70s, I was 18 and the only card I’d ever received was from one of those boys you like, but only as a friend. This was different. This was not from a boy, but a man, five years older than me, with a job, and a car, not borrowed from his mother. He cooked for me. He took me out for dinner and we drank red wine.

I hoped the neighbours could see the delivery van at our gate. At school I played it cool. “Did he send you a card?” asked a friend. “No,” I said, then paused a beat. “But I got two dozen carnations.” The drama soon flew around the class. Betsy propped her chin on her hand, eyed me sideways. “Michael gave me a red rose on my birthday.” But that didn’t cut it today.

The man and I talked about a future together. That end of school summer felt grown-up, full of anticipation for the life ahead of us. We danced in discos and had Mateus Rose wine parties in the sand dunes. Exam results swept my school friends and me into our next life phase, but as the volume and brightness of our lives turned up, my romantic feelings changed. I looked forward to escaping small town life for university in a city far away.

Maybe I lacked courage, or maybe I convinced myself that my feelings would revert to the love I’d felt, but I left for university city life with our attachment, in his mind, intact. So halfway through the first term of new friends, pints of beer, cheap carbohydrates and lectures in huge theatres, he came to visit. It was good to see a familiar home face, happy to socialise and charm my friends, but I knew there was something I had to do. I had to end it.

He thought I was confessing honourably to a fling he was prepared to forgive. But the truth was a dead end and he was devastated. We cried through the night until it was time for him to return home, but not to the life he’d planned.

I could still see him as I looked from the third floor tenement window, trudging along a grey November street, rucksack on his shoulders hunched against the cold wind of young love after it turns its face against you.