A few years from now, I’ll be sitting in a cinema watching some sci-fi comedy and recognise a bark of laughter nearby but won’t quite be able to place it. This will nag at me for a few minutes, until I’m distracted by a huge space spider on the screen.

After the movie, the audience will shuffle into the foyer and I’ll spot you, head tilted in that way I’d forgotten, listening to the man you’re with. Of course, I’ll think, considering turning away to avoid an awkward conversation. Too late—you’ll glance back, see me, and smile. You’ll say something to the man you’re with and amble over, hand cautiously outstretched. Our first ever handshake, its formality gently heartbreaking.

You'll say the man’s a friend and I’ll see you’re still a bad liar and wonder why you tried. I’ll ask if you enjoyed the movie and you’ll say, “Of course, you know how much I love space films!” I’ll remember that’s true and that I once knew your tastes almost as well as my own.

I feared losing you almost from our first date and so, in our radiant early years, I spent countless hours mapping your pleasures and preferences, from sexual to cinematic. I never wanted you to be bored around me. Sci-fi yes, arthouse no. Horror sometimes, apocalypse always. Knowledge accumulated over hundreds of date nights which slowly migrated from cinemas to home projectors to laptops in bed, both tapping at our phones.

I’ll ask about your family and you’ll say your parents are still alive though your mother—slowly losing her vision during our relationship—is now almost blind. I’ll say I’m sorry, and mean it.

I won’t understand everything you say. Your accent was always thick, but I attuned myself to your peculiar pronunciations and strange, right-but-not-quite phrasing. I never corrected the “horray!” messages you sent often in the first few years, they delighted me too much.

Then you’ll say you should get home and I’ll remember you go to bed early and wake late, a sleep glutton. I’ll wonder if Mr. New Man—hanging slightly back to give us space, assess me, or both—has adopted your routine. Does he worry when your joints click loudly in your sleep? Does he fear one day he’ll lose you and never get over it?

We’ll promise to catch up but that will be the last time I see your face and, one day, I’ll forget that too.

But that’s one day. Today, it’s three weeks since our old, crumbling cake of a relationship—once so fresh and sweet—fell apart. Today, I still share my head with you, instinctively assessing every film, restaurant and stupid joke for whether you’d like it. For seven years, I learned your preferences until knowledge became instinct. I have to somehow undo all of that, like trying to untangle the two strands of a DNA double helix. I must unlearn you and I will. I just don’t know how—not yet.