I am not your manic pixie dream girl.

Nobody wants to date me.

Yes, I say this, despite having turned down the painfully sweet advances of a guy I love as a friend but do not want to date. Despite the few-month relationships that characterised my 2013. Nobody wants to date me, as an actual living breathing crying bodily-function-having person. People want to date the person they think I am: a manic pixie dream girl.

I kind of can't blame them, to be honest. I have inadvertently stumbled into MPDG territory. I have short, brightly coloured hair. I'm a creative sort. I'm spontaneous and scatter-brained and clumsy and have a habit of grabbing people and dragging them with me on madcap adventures (or, more likely, to pub quizzes and Willow).

But the manic pixie dream girl trope reduces women down into merely these cartoon versions of themselves, who laugh and smile and exist to help direct the eternally-puzzled man puzzle out his eternally directionless life. I've been guilty of it, too (for a boy); thought how nice it would be to date the Welsh guy who I had a crush on for two years based purely on our mutual love for Fire Emblem games. What did I know about him? Not much. But he was attractive, and he represented a break from the ordinary.

And that's the problem. When someone dates you under MPDG assumptions, they are with you because they feel you will bring sparkle and impulse into their otherwise-lacking world. Like you will turn up and suddenly paint the trees a brighter shade of green, and open their eyes to the hitherto unnoticed beauty of Milan Kundera novels and fake glasses. Obviously, people can't do that: we're not magic, not one of us. We cannot force you to alter perceptions unless that capacity to change exists within yourself already.

Once people realise you exist as more than this human-shaped life-brightener, that is when I find the attraction wanes. I am not a manic pixie dream girl. I am not going to support you through every facet of your life. I have my own emotions to chart, my own existential crises to ponder. I get moody and vent about my feelings at inappropriate times; I talk about myself a lot, and I talk far too much when I'm nervous. I can be manic to the point of reckless, and I don't think about consequences enough, unless I'm thinking about them too much. I'm a perfectionist and spend tens of minutes wondering whether I can start this many sentences with "I" (answer: yes, because it's anaphora for rhetorical effect). I do things purely for the stories they will create, and steadfastly stand by principles even when my opponent is a friend.

I will not make your life better.

This is something my dear friend does not understand. Since I've turned down his advances - gently, and then more firmly to drive the message home - he has turned into the person I vent my woes to. He makes sure I know he's never more than a text away and knows just how to make me smile. It's sort of brilliant. He has manic pixie dream boyed himself. (But I'm still not going to date him.)

The thing is, you do not want to date me, V. S. Wells, semi-professional self-pitier and chronic complainer. You want to date Vee, the Facebook profile I present as my best version of me, the girl who dyes her hair monthly and bakes cookies in her knickers at 2am.

I'm not waiting for The One who loves me just as I am - because, honestly, I am a terrible girlfriend and do not want to inflict that upon anyone. This is not a plea for love. It is a request for the stereotyping to end. Just because Nicholas Sparks and Stephen Moffat can reduce women to personality quirks and value-added tits doesn't mean it works in real life.

I might be shiny on the surface, but - to quote the inimitable Andrea Gibson - "I know all of us are scratched, even if you can't hear it when we speak". I'm scratched. Stop thinking the record's perfect, and don't be disappointed when it starts to skip.

Some things he ruined.

So, in the manner of a girl who gets ahead of herself, it turns out my future planning has come to naught. My ambiguous manfriend is now just a "friend", of the "I think we should just be friends" ilk (and I catalogued my emotions pretty thoroughly on Thought Catalog).

It also occured to me that pretty much every post on this blog is about him in some way, seeing as I started writing it the day before our first date. It was the day he quit his internship, and yesterday was the day he started a new one. I'm just the stop gap amusement.

I think I'll have to make this the last post about him, as he's not The Boy any more. He's just a boy, who I thought I knew, but I guess not. I'm letting myself wallow for the moment, because I am upset, but I know I'll need to start feeling better sooner or later. It's not heartbreak, just heartbruise.

But for the moment, here is a list of things that remind me of him:

- Triathlons (because he runs them)
- Whole Foods in Kensington (because it was where we had our first date)
- My dress patterned with locks (because it's what I wore the first time we made out)
- Red-eared terrapins (because we watched them having a fight and laughed)
- Margherita pizza (which I am very annoyed about, because HE RUINED PIZZA. Because he described it as "naked pizza")
- The word "pugnacious" (because we argued about its definition and he couldn't believe I was right)
- My ceiling (because he made jokes about my posters)
- The Crane Wife by The Decemberists (because I spent ages trying to get him to listen to it, and then he didn't like it much)
- Picnics (because we promised to have one. Which never happened)
- Panda cupcakes (because he asked me to bake them as a joke, and I did)
- The music of Passenger (because he introduced me to it)
- London Aquarium (because it's where we had our last date)
- Scuba diving (because he insisted I should try it out)
- Nail varnish (because I painted my nails differently for every date)
- Fight Club (because we watched it together, and guessed the plot twist, and I fell asleep on his shoulder and missed the ending)
- Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 Prelude (because he was told to "play it to any girls he was courting", and didn't play it for me)

Every time I see or hear or think about one of these things, I get that feeling of being sucker-punched in the sternum all over again. He ruined them. But luckily time has a way of healing all wounds. It won't be long before they're fixed: it'll just be a while.

Queer. Here. Happy.

The day I made peace with identifying as queer also happened to be the day of my first date with The Boy.

I had been at a talk on YA literature the evening before, and was struck by the way these panelists threw around the word "queer" as an umbrella term to encompass LGBTI identities. Of course I'd heard it used that way before, but only online. Here, on the internet, it feels like a little separate bubble - people talk in a different way. A lot of them are from different places and live in a different societal context to me, with different privileges and prejudices, fighting the same battle different ways or different battles that I will never have to face. And now, there were people in front of me, talking in a way I'd only ever seen written down before.

"I'd hestitate to call my character a lesbian," said one of the authors. "I prefer queer - it's more general."

Queer. Originally meaning strange. Peculiar. Different. It has a degree of fluidity to it. While gay originally meant "happy", and has since been accepted in our daily vernacular to mean (a typically male) homosexual, queer hasn't been shoehorned and strongarmed in quite the same way.

It was a term of abuse originally, wasn't it? One which we reclaimed? And in that time, the mainstream seem to have become more accepting of sexualities which aren't just a binary of straight or not-straight. Queer did mean gay. It also meant bisexual and pansexual. Straight transpeople can identify as queer if they so please. Hell, it's not something we police. You don't get stopped by a sexy butch with a crewcut and ferociously pink uniform, brandishing a clipboard, who demands you fill out a survey in order to qualify for using the term.

And yet, the term never quite sat right with me. I was bisexual, pansexual, sexually fluid and - sometimes, contrarily - "label-free". Other people were queer. I was a girl who sometimes liked boys and sometimes liked girls and sometimes liked people of an indeterminate gender, or people who identified outside of two genders. I preferred jeans to dresses, felt a thrill of transgression at wearing formal mens' suits (and looking damn sexy in them), and cheerfully joked about being the "token not-straight person" - but I was never queer.

It's not like sexuality is something I can turn on or off either. I can remember dating a girl and commenting to my friends about an attractive guy who walked past - and they looked at me, and said "don't you have a girlfriend?", an accusation, a rebuke. As if, while dating a girl, I should only be attracted to other females. But it doesn't work like that. And it doesn't work the other way, either: going out with a boy does not magically erase my attraction to girls or androgynes. 

Stood in a pub on Friday, a skinny musician sort with long ginger hair and a shirt unbuttoned to the sternum smiled at me. There was a tattoo on his chest which I couldn't quite make out, and he was wearing biker boots. Pretty rather than handsome. The sort of guy who, a year ago, I would have fallen for in an instant.

"Are you from round here?" he asked, closing the distance between us slightly, and I wondered if he was flirting with me. I was in my denim jacket studded with badges, shorts and laddered tights, my short hair recently dyed a lurid shade of scarlet and the metal ring glinting in my nose. I looked a bit edgy, I supposed.

"Ah, no," I said, smiling. "I'm just a visitor. I'm here seeing someone."

"Oh! Seeing the guy who just went to the bar!"

"Yeah."

"Your boyfriend, I presume?"

"I hesitate to say boyfriend... he's my... person that I'm dating."

"Ah! So the person you're having sex with, you mean."

"No, actually."

"Really? Well. He seems nice. Polite. Said "after you" to me and all."

"Yeah. He's one of the good guys, I think."

We started discussing Alkaline Trio and Reading festival, and moved away from the topic of my relationship. The above exchange lasted maybe a minute at most, but I wondered if he would have made the same comments had I walked in with a girl. If he would have broken into that creepy over-interested schtick, or made a lurid invitation for a threesome, stuff I've dealt with before and become almost resigned to as the associated bullshit of liking ladies.

(My ambiguous manfriend, on account of being a generally decent human being, has never done anything like that. He just accepts me the way I am. He sympathises when I complain about microagressions that he as a straight white cisgender guy has never experienced. He laughs with me while I crack jokes about the rainbow painted over my door - "really, my parents should have known better; I shouldn't come out to them, I should just point at the paintwork" - while knowing I'd be pissed if he made that joke himself. So far, he is definitely a good guy.)

Hetero relationships comes with privilege. I'm mistaken for straight as a side-effect of being in a straight relationship. I've yet to deal with being thrown out of a queer space for being mistaken for an interloper, but it's definitely a fear I have. It's called bisexual erasure - when bisexual people are misidentified as straight (when they date someone of the opposite sex) or gay (when dating someone of the same sex) and somehow shunned by both camps as being capricious, greedy, indecisive.

But - to me - being queer means being able to embrace who you are, contradictory personality aspects and all. I am queer when I am drunk and asking boys to rate my tits (which still makes me cringe when I think about it). I am queer when I am rebuffing advances from straight girls looking to titillate their boyfriends. I am queer when reading about lesbian sex or when kissing The Boy goodnight.

I kind of feel like this is what life is about - finding who you are, coming to love it, working out the words that suit you rather than trying to change to fit into expectations. That's why I'm coming to like the term "queer". It's not as specific or narrow as other words. It's not the whole of my identity, just one of the pieces I'm putting together. It's a puzzle. There are gaps I haven't filled yet. I'm okay with that.

Not a Madonna or a whore.

Everywhere you look, there are conflicting messages about heterosexual girls' virginity. If you have sex, you're easy. If you don't, you're frigid.

It's amazing how prolific the Madonna/whore complex is, how it's permeated even modern-day life. In its most basic form, it's the idea than girls come in two models of sexuality: Madonnas, the image of purity and chastity; and whores, sexualised and seductive. Which one is portrayed positively depends on the tone of the writer, if either is at all. It's a hangover from ancient times, when women having sex outside marriage would ruin your reputation, and illegitimate children were a threat to inheritence. Thus Madonnas were idolised. Since the rise of birth control though, girls who won't put out are uptight; they need to loosen up. What are you meant to listen to? It's a tangled skein of contradictions.

Honestly, it seems like a wonder anyone has normal functioning relationships at all.

"Sex is everything!" scream some sources. "Sex is the whole point of human existence! People only exist to be eye candy! See this girl? SHE IS TITS AND A BUTT. She's there for you to fuck! See this shirtless guy? HE IS THERE FOR SEXYTIMES. If you're not having sex YOU ARE WRONG. Asexuality doesn't exist! People should want to fuck ALL THE TIME. The answer to any of your woes is to HAVE MORE SEX."

I exaggerate, but you know the sentiment. If that sounds overly familiar, and I'm not exaggerating, then that's just scary. The advertising industry is the worst. It seems like ANYTHING can be sold if you stick a pair of tits next to it.

Then there's the more insidious 'sex-positivity' that comes from Cosmo and that ilk - the sort that doesn't actually encourage you to enjoy sex, but how to "make your man" happy. Your own enjoyment should come from pleasuring your boyfriend/husband/one night stand! Your sex drive should be malleable to his! If you ask for him to do anything for you, you're a greedy scum-sucking road whore!

On the flip side, you've got the Modesty Police and all those conservative moral guardians. No sex before marriage, or you will be forever tainted and no man will ever want you again. If you get raped, it is YOUR FAULT for being a sneaky whore and tempting men! These are the people who think women should be meek and mild. You know those chastity balls where girls take vows never to even TOUCH a boy before marriage? That's the extreme end of it. 

Looking at these contrasting positions, I find it strange that I, as a person, seem to fall more in line with the latter - the chaste one. I've had a few chances where I could have had sex: my friend's drunk friend who asked me to eat her out; my crush and I spending the night making out heatedly on an airbed; the boy I'm dating staying over at my house. (It was great; he'd lied to his parents about where he was, the same way as I'd lied about who I was having for a sleepover. I loved the puerile secrecy of it.) But I've never gone there, not yet.

I think I must have been corrupted by television. For all my sex positivity - which largely comes down to "YOU DO YOU!" - I don't want my first time to be on a whim. I want it to be... as near to perfect as possible. I want it to be with someone who loves me, male or female. But that requires relationships. I'm normally too lazy for those: I am a virgin out of passivity. That said, I'm pretty ambivalent about my virginity. It's just a transient status which has no wider reverberations on my personality, akin to saying "I bleach my hair" or "I have asthma". It's hardly a sufficient summary of my whole personality, you know?

One of my friends lost her virginity to a boy she'd known for three weeks, and been dating for two. I was kind of surprised - another friend and I sat, over coffee, wondering if she'd come to regret it. We thought she'd get hurt. But while our concern for her well-being may have been valid, it was misplaced: we were treating sex as something dangerous. We were denying her agency, something I take up arms about in all other situations. If she wanted to have sex with him, why were we this surprised about it? It was like we were slut-shaming. I spent the next few days mulling over that conversation, hating myself for being so judgemental.

In the same way as over-sexualisation is bullshit, modesty is bullshit. The idea that girls should cover up lest they tempt men to rape them? Utter balls. But it's still permeated our culture.

I'm half-expecting everyone who reads this to raise their eyebrows, but you're probably young liberal sorts, more likely to wonder why a virgin is writing about sex than why a girl would talk about her sexuality on the internet.

If things keep going this way, there is a good chance I'll screw The Boy. It seems too far away to think about in detail; even last night, when we were rolling around in my bed in only our underwear, firmly established at second base, sex never really crossed my mind. (I thought I could feel his boner against my thigh, but I didn't want to ask in case I was wrong, or my intentions were misconstrued.) It's less about actively protecting my virgin status, more just a reluctance to do anything in case I regret it later. It's not even an aversion to sex - hell, just writing this is making me want to jump his bones - but an aversion to trying to force the pace of our relationship.

Maybe I need to live more in the moment. Maybe I need to stop second-guessing myself. I definitely need to stop judging other people. It doesn't matter if your first time is with someone you love or someone you barely know; as long as it's consensual, it's all good. I will lose my virginity when I feel comfortable, and I shouldn't be made to feel guilty if it's sooner or later than anyone else.

It doesn't matter if you're a nymphomanic or totally asexual, Jezebel or the Virgin Mary - judgement is bullshit. The virgin/whore dichtomoy is bullshit. Real sex positivity comes from just doing things that give you pleasure, and fuck other people's considerations: you do you.

Meditations on terminations.

April 4th marked my seventh date with the boy my friends lovingly refer to as my "ambiguous manfriend". It was just shy of seven weeks since we'd met, and just under six weeks since our first date. He was not my boyfriend. We were dating but not going out.

We met in Caffe Nero after I got out of work, and I watched him drink hot chocolate while telling him about my day. He'd had a haircut. It was hilarious. He offered to buy me coffee, but I refused; I'd spent the day in a tea-fueled haze and my stomach was full of sloshy liquid. After an hour of giggling in the coffee shop, garnering dirty looks from the rest of the pseudo-hip Oxford Street caffeine fiends scrounging for their next espresso shot, we decided to get dinner. We walked next door to get Chinese food and held hands across the single street we crossed.

Our conversation over dinner started out innocuous - the weather, shoes, Singapore. American politics.

"The South is scary," he said. "I wouldn't want to live anywhere with such lax gun laws."

"The Midwest isn't so peachy either," I said. "Like, North Dakota is fucked. They've just passed a law banning abortions after six weeks! And that's six weeks from your last period, not even the date the baby's conceived, so you could be pregnant for only two weeks and denied an abortion. Now that's scary!"

There was a silence which stretched slightly too long.

"Is it bad I think abortion's a bad thing?" he said. I glanced at him, then back down at my vegetable fried rice. I tried to remember my friend Emily's technique for using chopsticks, but ended up reverting to my method of shovelling the food with them.

"I'm not sure it's a good thing, necessarily," I replied, "but it is necessary. And trying to curtail it when there isn't a real reason is really stupid."

"But - ah - isn't there a real reason?" he said, eating his own rice. I realised what was about to happen. I was going to spend the rest of this dinner sat opposite a boy who made my heart flutter, arguing about an issue close to my heart. It was something people had died over before. I thought about Savita Halappanavar, the Northern Irish women denied an abortion because there was a foetal heartbeat; she died of septicemia, in agony, her baby along with her.

"No?"

"It's all life, isn't it?"

Isn't it?

Is it?

In my mind, a foetus is not alive. It doesn't have rights. The point of viability - around 26 weeks - the point when a baby can live outside its mother's body: that's when life begins. When the brain can process pain, and has developed the startle reflex (and can react to external stimuli) - that's when it goes from being a hunk of cells into something real and living. Before that, in my mind, a foetus is nothing more than a parasite.

If you rely totally and utterly on another organism to keep you alive, all take and give, then that's hardly a symbiosis. It's all well and good if you want to carry the baby, and keep it alive: I recall hearing some mothers say that pregnancy is something sacred, something pure. But if you don't want to? If your own resources are being drained to feed an alien inside your abdomen? Nobody should have to suffer through that involuntarily.

I tried to explain this to the boy, and added that safety is another issue. Women have been getting rid of unwanted babies throughout history; better to do it safely, with medical care, than illegally and alone in a back alley.

"But whenever a woman has sex, and she gets pregnant, it's a risk she knew she was taking, so it's her fault - or, equally her fault and his fault."

I looked at him. I'm pretty sure the rice fell off my chopsticks. It was the sort of statement I'd expect from Todd Akin, not the beautiful cello-playing Tory-hating liberal biochemist sat across the table from me.

"So she ought to be able to rectify the mistake," I said.

"What about the father? Doesn't he get a say? What if this girl gets pregnant, and six weeks later says, I'm pregnant and want an abortion, and he says no, I want us to have kids? What then?"

"She has an abortion," I said. It was a stupid question. The baby wasn't going to invade him for nine months, get in the way of all his plans, strain to breaking point her friendships and physicality. The baby wasn't going to stretch his orifices, possibly kill him giving birth, make him gain weight or swell his ankles or strain his back.

"Is that it? You're throwing away a whole life because it gets in the way for nine months? Just think of the potential you're wasting!" he exclaimed. I raised my eyebrows.

"Okay," I said. "Say that couple was us. Say tonight, we get a bit carried away and fuck without protection, and in six weeks' time I'm pregnant. It's not you who's going to be pregnant. It's not you who will have all your future plans for the next almost-year fucked up. It's me. It's my body. And before the embryo turns into a foetus into a baby, it's just a part of me, which I don't want, so I have to be able to get rid of it."

He looked at me around his mouthful of egg-fried carbohydrates.

"Why are you prioritising the woman's life over the baby's?"

"Because she's alive," I said. "She's me. The baby is just... cells. Especially at six weeks. You don't issue stem cells with passports and birth certificates. The baby doesn't exist anywhere outside of a tiny triangle of uterus. She does."

When he replied, I smiled, tight-lipped, and carried on eating. He was an athiest, like me; but every argument he spouted sounded like the same old Sanctity of Life bullshit which the Church has used to enslave women for as long as written records stretch back.

"I don't think it's wrong," he finished, "just... I don't know if I agree with it."

"I just..." I started, but I couldn't go on. I picked up my spoon and ate the rest of my dinner with it, scraping up the last few vegetables. "Yeah."

The silence returned. We both cleared our plates, methodically eating every last item.

"I like your nails," he said, and I was glad he'd changed the subject.

"Thanks."

At least our first argument was about something that mattered, rather than any of the usual trivialities like how to split the bill or where to go for dinner.

We returned to talking about lighter things, less fractious ones. We walked through the chilly London streets and went to a busy pub. We drank, leaning against a wall because it was too busy to sit down. Eventually a sofa became free, and I snuggled into his shoulder when he put his arm around me. Before we left I ran downstairs to the bathrooms, following the shiny signs to the shiny white ladies'. I ducked into a stall, and noticed the smear of new red blood in my knickers. Five days of stomach cramps and low-level mood swings and craving for sugar would follow. But it could be worse.

Well. At least I wasn't pregnant.

Kiss me.

Kiss me the moment you see me.

Kiss me like an almost-drowned man kisses the land. Kiss me like an astronaut kisses the stars. Kiss me like a 19th-century Russian novellist kissed their typewriter.

Kiss me like you can't believe it's been so long since you last kissed me, like the time has gone by in an irksome crawl since then, like this waiting has been a mistake you want to rectify as soon as possible.

Kiss me like I'm a test you've been studying for all week. Kiss me like your last-minute nerves are kicking in your belly. Kiss me like you're going to get full marks.

Kiss me like there's a butterfly on my lips and you want your breath to tickle its wings.

Kiss me like there's a magnet under my skin and your lips are made of iron. Kiss me like we're hydrogen atoms and you want to covalently bond. Kiss me to get me to stop making terrible science jokes.

Kiss me like a supernova. I don't even know how that would be possible. But I want it to happen. I imagine it will be colours and lights and heat and spectacle, something rare and sharp and shocking. Kiss me like that.

Kiss me on the Tube. Kiss me in public, where everyone can see and judge us for being obnoxious and young. Kiss me when we're travelling, because it's not the destination that matters but the leaving, the going, the arriving.

Kiss me like I'm the love of your life. Kiss me like I'm a porn star.
Kiss me like I'm made of memory foam and every touch lasts forever. Kiss me like you're trying to corrupt me.
Kiss me virgin, kiss me whore, kiss me patriarchal dichotomies where, just for once, I'd win either way.

Kiss me like an absolution.

Kiss me like you're telling me your thoughts in another language we're both trying to learn.

Kiss me so hard that you've backed me against a wall and it's all saliva and teeth and lips and tongue and basic human anatomy, and all rational thought has been replaced by the need to be close, closer, closest.

Kiss me like a secret you can't bear to hide any more.

Kiss me like you could break me, fix me, bend me, shape me, mould me, push me, pull me, complete me, empty me, perfect me, ruin me, totally and utterly verb me.

Kiss me goodbye.

Kiss me like we're kids hiding in a tree house and learning what each other's bodies are for. Kiss me like I'm going to write a song about it, and you want it to be three minutes of heaven. Kiss me like you wish we could spend the night, like this wasn't the end of another date.

Kiss me like you want to keep me.

Just shut the hell up and kiss me.

Broken rules and bleeding hearts.

There are rules about how to act in every social situation. They may be unwritten, or contained in tomes nobody owns up to owning but everyone does; they might be whispered in corners or written about in op-eds for swanky magazines, but there are rules governing everything. If you transgress the rules, who knows what might happen? You'll get a sneaky side-eyed sneer, or maybe a public critique, or perhaps the whole of society will crumble and crash down around your ears - and it'll all be your fault, because you didn't obey the rules.

One of the things I'm aware of is how I play by these rules, even when I don't consciously mean to. I'll find myself waiting for hours to receive texts from people, and then - rather than replying instantly, which is my usual course of action - I'll instead leave the message, saved as a draft, on my phone. I won't send it until half an hour, an hour, two hours, have elapsed - to make it seem like I'm just SO in demand, I'm too busy to reply to texts instantly, and you should be glad I bestowed my pity upon you and typed out a few lines of banal conversation. It means I spared you a thought, when I could have just forgotten. Be grateful.

This applies to everyone - friends, family, crushes. I just get scared of being in a position of vulnerability. I don't want to admit I like someone, in whatever capacity, because that means peeling back a little bit of your skin and showing something raw; and once it's out there, anyone can come and prod it, and make you hurt. Better to keep your bleeding heart in your chest, rather than where it habitually rests on my sleeve. Better to wear a coat and stop your feelings from being seen.

When I do come out and say exactly what I mean, I tend to get hurt. And everyone's afraid of being hurt. That's why there's so much bullshit in who is supposed to say what when, where you're supposed to go and what you're supposed to want. If you stick to the rules, you are safe. You're working within an established framework. Even if things go wrong, they'll fuck up within a pre-existing situation.You won't be far away from where you're supposed to be, and it's not that hard to get back in the game, start a new turn, and let all the rules carry you along again.

It's why I feel guilty about my last kiss. It was the end of a first date (with a boy who makes me feel like I swallowed a dragonfly) and we were at Edgeware Road. He had to catch the tube one way, and I the other. He stood on the train, and I on the platform. There was a narrow gap in the roof of the station. We shared a quick, chaste kiss while the thin snow fell through the gap and powdered our hair. The tube departed, and I watched him go, suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling I had been left behind. That was one of the rules of heterosexual, traditional relationships - the girl is supposed to leave first, making the boy wait for her, his breath catching in his throat. It's not supposed to be the other way round.

I crossed the bridge to the other platform, to catch my own train, and had to avert my eyes from all the happy couples canoodling in the cold. Their laughter mingled in front of their faces, a soft-focus mist which could have come from either set of lungs.

I wished, one day, I could be that happy - even if it was only superficial. Maybe in the grey light of morning they would sit next to each other in bed - these laughing, kissing couples - and they wouldn't speak, keeping their unhappiness to themselves, maintaining a facade on the streets of London that they were bright and chipper and in love. But there's a reason you keep misery at home: the only thing worse than public displays of affection is public displays of unhappiness.

And that's just another rule. Keep the dirty laundry to your own washing machine.

If I were that unhappy, though, I would argue in public. I would make a scene, run onto the wrong train on purpose, lock myself in a bathroom and have a public official be called to get me out. I would make old women tut and young professionals avert their eyes in embarrassment and children stare, slack-jawed. If you're going to unravel, you might as well do it somewhere everyone can see. Maybe, just maybe, there would be a sympathetic stranger around to help patch your frayed edges back together and resew your hems. I have faith in the human race yet.

But I also have faith in myself. These rules might have been around for years, but I'm sure I know myself better than some anonymous set of social norms. So I might provoke the ire of traditionalists everywhere, but I will tentatively display my battered heart, and blame only myself if it gets broken. I will text back immediately and watch people leave me behind - because I am stronger than my anxieties, and I trust that everyone I love will come back - it might just take them a while.

An accident of genetics.

I am always surprised when someone compliments my face. “You have fine features,” said the French mother of one of my friends. “You have lovely cheekbones,” said a girl in my Politics class, stopping me on the staircase to impart this knowledge. She said it in a rush, like she had to get the words out before they stopped being true. “You’re gorgeous,” said the first person I kissed. I didn’t trust him then, and I don’t trust them now.

Appearance is all an accident. My face is a mess, a random collection of biology and genetics that spawned from the freak meeting of an egg and a sperm. By all accounts, I should not exist. But by some fluke, I do, and how my face looks seems pretty irrelevant to me.

I stare at my reflection in the window of the train. We’re passing through a tunnel. I’m on my way home from the fourth day of my week of work experience, which is generously called an “internship”. It has been four days of writing blog posts and wondering when I’ll be told to do some admin.

I’ve spent the past two hours at a book panel for the company, listening to assorted people talking about LGBT representation in Young Adult literature. America is the spiritual home of YA literature, opined the only man on the panel, and his four co-panellists nodded and laughed. I liked him. He was camp and had a Yorkshire accent. I wanted to be his friend.

One of the panellists was a student at York University, a third year, and writing a dissertation on LGBT issues in business. She was surprised at my age, said she thought I looked older than her, at 21. It's not my face, apparently - more my confidence, the fact I hold up my head like my brain is full of helium - but I can't help but feel ancient. Betrayed by my own aesthetics.

The chairwoman gave me her email address and told me to stay in contact. I’ll email her tomorrow, once I get to the office, sending her a message from the sluggish Macs that need updating. It’ll make me feel like a proper adult contacting her for work reasons rather than a teenager typing away behind her laptop. 

Tomorrow is also important because I will have a date. The first date of my life which is a real, proper date, where I was asked out with the specific caveat that it was a date and I said yes. With my two ex-girlfriends, we never saw each other one-on-one; it was always as part of a group, where it was easier to pretend that our relationships were based on actual feelings rather than a shared interest in webcomics and a habit of texting late at night.

There was one other time I went out with a boy, but I'm not sure it was a date. He was hardly a boy - a foot taller than me, 23, with a job in publishing. We ate Chinese food in Camden and discussed how Tolkein presented evil, and I pretended like I'd read Lord Of The Rings and knew what he was talking about. That was three weeks ago, and I'm still not sure if it was a date. We put one kiss on the end of texts to each other.

We were meant to go bowling, me and this new date of mine (“of mine” – so selfish – like a person is a possession, like I already own a piece of him) but everywhere has already been booked. I imagine we’ll wonder round London instead, trying to make small talk that means something big. I will want to hold his hand, feel something warm and solid against my frozen fingers. If we don’t get dinner I’ll scream.

I’ve somehow fallen into the habit of not eating lunch this week, instead just snacking on biscuits and endless cups of tea throughout the day. It’s too cold to leave the office in search of food, and I have to walk half a mile every morning from the train station up a gentle incline anyway. Today the wind was blowing in my face, forcibly thrusting the scent of North London’s rubbish into my nostrils. I couldn’t breathe.

I’ve lost three pounds since Friday. It’s like I left them under my pillow – I haven’t noticed their absence.

If I mentioned my weight to my friends, I can imagine them complimenting me. “You’ve lost weight!” they’d say (when they mean "mass"), approvingly, followed by, “You look good!” as if those things were logically sequential. As if by losing a tiny part of me, I’ve somehow improved. Really we ought to applaud each other when we gain weight, knowing that there’s more of them to hold onto. Is a 143-pound girl realer than a 140-pound one? There’s certainly more of her, more atoms banding together in the shape of a person. Does quantity equate to reality?

My iPod has stopped playing, but my earphones are still in. To everyone around me, I am in my own little world. I could be listening to anything, Bach or Beyonce or Bright Eyes. Like Life by Lorrie Moore sits open on my lap, but I have stopped reading because there’s a quote I want to put on my Facebook page when I get home, about how guns are boys’ things because they boom, the way boys wished they boomed when they orgasm. Maybe I’ll tell that to my date tomorrow. Maybe he’ll laugh. More likely he’ll look at me quizzically, wondering why he asked me out. He studied biochemistry at university, where an unexpected result probably means you did something wrong.

The train leaves the tunnel. My face remains in the window, pale and drawn. My hair is bleached blond, murky at the roots where my natural brown is growing back through. Perhaps I should let it grow out, get long, fall to my knees in princess waves I can use to wrap myself up. Perhaps I’ll shave my head down to a soft dark fuzz, getting rid of all the dye and artifice.

The face looking back is still mine, but I’m seized by the notion that one day it won’t be. One day I’ll be on the train home from a job I hold as an adult, commuting to and from some shabby flat I can barely afford to rent, and my face will have been taken from me, worn smooth and featureless by a few years of mediocre labour at a mediocre job.

We arrive at my station, and I stand up. Nobody seems surprised when I drop my phone, and have stoop to pick it up. They’re too busy thinking of their own faces, their own emails and waistlines and dates.

On Monday I’ll be back at school, I tell myself. I will be back in a bubble where I can talk about dating and jobs as abstract concepts rather real things which really happen. Being a grown-up can wait. My face has some youth left in it yet.