Jeremy.

So why am I moving countries for this guy?

It's not because of his love of warmth.

Or his imagination and flair for fashion.

Or the way he never cracks the bones in his fingers / toes / neck.

And it's certainly not because of how he recognises that eating super spicy food makes him ill and grumpy and therefore he doesn't do it.

It's because when it comes to Jeremy I stop writing.

Here's what I'm talking about:

Lately I've been sorting. It's a necessary preliminary and/or procrastinatory packing activity, to make sure that I make best use of the precious square foot of loft space my parents have bestowed upon me and to make sure that I don't end up treasuring forever bits of wrapping paper when I can't even remember their relevance (if there ever was one).

I am an emotional hoarder (I'm sure you are mightily surprised by that revelation). I attach significance to almost everything. I'm also a compulsive scribbler. All emotions, fears, dreams, random thoughts are recorded - in backs of books, middles of note-pads, multiple diaries kept for a few months and then forgotten - my entire life from age 10 is written down. So you'll see that sorting through all of this stuff is a) time consuming and b) embarrassing. My teenage voice makes me want to build a time machine so I can go back and give myself a smack and tell me to stop being so painfully introspective and sentimental.

Because of course I've moved on so much since then...

In amongst the angsty blush-worthy chronicles are also letters. Letters from ex boyfriends, from distant friends, cards from parents and grandparents, notes and scraps and scribbles that when added together plot my life and my people so accurately and substantially that voices and feelings push their way through the clouded recesses of memory to assert themselves with surprising potency.

And so I spent hours reading my life. It was all mixed up of course - no order whatsoever, but since when is life remembered chronologically? What stuck out for me, aside from the number of trees that sacrificed themselves for my histories, was how simple things became when I met Jeremy.

There are people reading this who have just choked on their breakfast.

Yes yes, I know that Jeremy and I have been anything but simple. I know there has been heartache - what do you expect for a relationship spanning 6 years, 3000 miles and 5 irritating hours of time-difference? But what I mean is that when it came to Jeremy all my scribblings stopped. Prior to Jeremy every relationship had been accompanied by a forest's worth of confusion, doubt and indecision. Even declarations of love had been fanciful and overblown, often aged with coffee and burnt around the edges to give that really authentic look (you think I'm kidding?). In my holiday diary the summer of Italy, I spent whole trees theorising about the tall Australian I regretted kissing in Sicily but my entry for the 5 days where I met Jeremy was 'Jeremy kissed me'.

When it came to Jeremy I stopped writing and started living.

Well, mostly. I'm still a Hannah after all.

Some person somewhere wrote that happiness writes white. I really hope they're wrong because I'd very much like to be happy and to continue writing.

Having said that, considering how corny the stopping writing/ starting living sentence is, I have an inkling they're 100% right and that happy people better hope they write white because they don't have any business writing at all. Forgive me - I promise not to go all saccharine smug married on you. I have more than enough cynicism to sustain me and America is guaranteed to give me excessive amounts of material. Let's just hope, for the sake of my marriage, that Jeremy stays out of print.