In the messenger bag I lost earlier this week, along with my phone and iPod, was a little leather Filofax book I use to jot down notes. Yesterday, looking for a temporary replacement, I pulled out an old bound journal from a year back that still had some blank pages left, and tossed it in another bag that was in my closet.

I headed out with the journal in tow last night, when I met up with Sarah Brown for drinks in Brooklyn. And, on the subway back, I started thumbing my way through, reading over the array of entries made by an earlier me.

One of the pages, about halfway through, was a list of quirks of the girl I was dating at the time – how she scrunched her nose when embarrassed, over-pronounced the word ‘literally’, placed a piece of ginger atop each piece of sushi, or shook her head slightly to free her ponytail each time it got caught up in the collar of her jacket.

Just a few days before, I had been thinking about that very girl, trying to remember why I was so desperately in love with her, why I had set out on a relationship that anybody could have said (and often did) was doomed from the start. And, as I made my way through the list of idiosyncrasies, thought back on how she looked down, embarrassed, when laughing too hard, how she closed just one eye when she needed to concentrate, it all made perfect sense.