Dear friend,

Thank you for the invitation to your wedding that arrived in the post this morning. I haven't seen you since we graduated; it must be a big event.

I did not know you were seeing anyone seriously. No-one we ever met on countless bar nights could hold your interest for long; the freedom more pleasurable than the sex. I can't think how to ask if it's something he has or something you have lost.

Maybe you'll just say the white of your veil represents new beginnings, instead.

2pm at St Michaels and All Angels' - your fiance is Catholic, maybe. I remember a lecture hall one pale, wintry afternoon, your paper that couldn't disguise its joy in celebrating a nihilist's ideas of atheist destiny. A delivery giddy with a thousand possibilities of life free from dogma.

Our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, 'older'.

Perhaps it is a just a pretty church.

I have visited the gift registry you specified. Matching porcelain from the girl who ate from paper plates, washing up time better spent on reading through the night.

I want to say, don't. To take you by the hand down to the beach and get drunk again on cheap vodka, kicking through shingle and planning lives with no compromise, no convention, no approval. And I can't tell which of us I'm crying for.