It is a peculiarity of knitters that they chronically underestimate the amount of time it takes to knit something. Birthday on Saturday? No problem. Socks are small. Never mind that the average sock knit out of sock-weight yarn contains about 17,000 stitches. Never mind that you need two of them. (That's 34,000 stitches, for anybody keeping track.) Socks are only physically small. By stitch count, they are immense.

I'm sorry for breaking down when I should've been stitching myself back up

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

You really need stitches," she tells me."Or you're going to have a scar." I try not to laugh. Stitches aren't going to help. They fix skin, cuts, wounds, heal stuff on the outside. Everything broken with me is on the inside. "I can handle scars, especially one's on the outside.

In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.

Love is an operation theatre, where you find the scalpel and the stitches