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The first time I saw Marina was in October 2013. The last time I saw her was three months later.

It seems strange to put it like that. It still surprises me – despite having had years to think about it – how short that time frame is. Sometimes it is assumed that the oldest relationships are the most influential, and that those who know us for the longest periods are those who shape us most significantly. But often the opposite is true. It is the short, intense relationships which have the strongest impacts on us, and only those who flit in and out of our lives who have the power to make us profoundly different. The time spent with them is so brief that each moment in their company becomes effortlessly memorable. The feelings and smells and images that they evoke worm into our brains and we find ourselves returning to them compulsively – trying to pin them down, trying to understand their effects.

I still don’t understand what happened with Marina. I don’t understand the effect that our friendship had on either of us. The more I think about her, the more she eludes me.

But it would be wrong to say that I don’t remember anything about her. I remember everything extremely clearly, to the extent where I feel as though I know her well. I remember the way her eyes curled at the sides when she smiled; the way they narrowed with suspicion in seminars; the way she smoked with the cigarette balanced in the middle of her mouth. I remember the sound of her voice too: soft and low on the phone, deep and loud in large groups, slightly nasal with an upward inflection when she spoke to boys. My memory of her is so vivid that even hearing her name provokes a kind of frenzy in me. Without warning my mind fogs over, casts back, and it is like the last four years never happened. We are both eighteen again, stood outside the library, rolling our eyes at the other students.

Over the last few years I have been good at restraining myself. I have cut myself off from that life. I do not keep in touch with anyone from university. I have removed all traces of myself, online and elsewhere, so that they won’t be able to find me. I have tried to ensure that I am forgotten, so that every piece of my history is forgotten. And then I can forget it myself.

But recently she has started to reinsert herself into my thoughts. I see someone in the street with the same gait, or the same curl in the bottom of their hair, and my stomach lurches. I catch a whiff of her perfume – a sort of honey blossom scent – and my palms begin to sweat, I feel light-headed, convinced that she is in the vicinity.

It feels different this time. The newspaper headlines, the flashes of her face across the TV screens … I can’t help but suspect that everything is about to come to light. She is catching up with me. I need to set the record straight before someone else gets there first. I need to tell the story, as it was, from the beginning.