The stories in this collection are works of fiction inspired by memories, emotional truths, and the awkward, beautiful mess of teenage longing. Names have been changed, characters blended or reinvented, and moments reimagined. What remains is a sincere attempt to chart the intensity of youthful desire and confusion, not a record of historical fact. These are stories, not transcripts. Interpret them with the same generous curiosity you’d offer your younger self. If something gets through, please let me know, and I’ll remove it.
Unearthing the Love Chart
I open a creased, yellowing sheet of paper—the artifact of my 16-year-old heart. Drawn in 1978 with pen, paint, and earnest tears, it is a Love Chart I crafted in the throes of teenage heartbreak. Folds divide the paper into panels, now fragile at the seams from decades of being tucked away in a shoebox. Across its surface, a jagged inked line rises and falls, mapping the ecstatic highs and aching lows of first love lost. Tiny handwritten notes crowd the margins—dates, brief phrases, half-legible now, that once captioned each peak and valley of emotion. This humble chart, created with a ruler, watercolor swatches, and shaky adolescent handwriting, has survived nearly half a century. It feels deeply personal and strangely historic, as though I am holding not just a memento of my youth but a relic of a bygone era of analog emotion.
The handmade “Love Chart” (1978) unfolds to reveal peaks of joy and troughs of sorrow. Each colored segment and scribbled note preserves a moment in teenage time, externalising the inner turmoil of first heartbreak. This tactile graph is a testament to a sixteen-year-old boy attempting to chart the unchartable.
It is painted in segments of green, blue, and sunburst orange, I see chapters of a youthful romance: the green spring of yearning and discovery, the cold blue of loneliness, a flash of bright orange hope at a reconciliation that never lasted or the blood red of disaster – she’s not interested!
To say I made a constant mess of things would be an understatement. It was like one of those chess challenges where a player competes against a dozen others. I was the one playing alone. However, I was clueless. One good game would have been enough, but everything kept stalling or going sideways, so I’d move on to the next board, make a few moves and maybe get to a slow dance before we all went home. What was the expression, ‘playing the field’? To paraphrase Julia Roberts from a male perspective, “I was just a boy, standing in front of a girl, asking her to love me.” Did I ask too often? Should I have gone fishing in these waters with a rod, not a net?
The word ‘love’ was easy to write in a letter, and many of those are written when you are at boarding school. Did we ever say it face-to-face at that age and understand its meaning or believe it?
What did we know? What could we know? My late grandfather, whom I often quote, would say, “As long as you don’t hurt anybody.”
I’m sorry to those I hurt, to those with bruised hearts or tears. And thank you. I inflicted several self-inflicted wounds on my heart and learnt a few lessons that have finally stood the test of time.
You bounce through youth like the proverbial ball in a pinball game; you’re blessed to get into the right relationship early and know so before you ruin it by continuing the quest for ‘the one’.
The Y-Axis: A Scale of Feeling
On the left-hand side of the chart runs an emotional spectrum—though it wasn’t labelled as such at the time. Looking at it now, it’s a vertical map of the adolescent psyche:
- L – Love
- SL – Strong Like (hopeful, idealistic)
- IF – Infatuation/Fascination (a crush or the early tremors of one)
- GF – Girlfriend status (a fiction or a fact, unclear)
- F – Fondness, flirtation, possibility
- K – Kiss (a factual mark—something has happened)
- Wmg? Wanting more? (uncertainty, yearning)
- ? – Confusion, ambiguity
- Upset – Sadness, disappointment
- Angst – Existential worry, overthinking
- Rage – Jealousy, injustice, thwarted pride
- Loathe – Reversal, disgust, overcorrection
- Envy – Comparison, inadequacy
- SH – Self-hate (internalised rejection, shame)
- H – Hate (the emotional floor, usually directed at oneself or one’s rival)
Looking at it now, I marvel at the unintentional precision. Any therapist would recognise this as an entire emotional vocabulary—raw, reactive, but incredibly honest.
The Events Column: Micro-Histories
Beneath the X-axis, I’d scribbled the timeline of the year. Some weeks had clear headings:
- “Tennis, shots, kiss.”
- “S + C”
- “S + 16/15 – Gosforth etc.”
- “J’s R’s” (cryptic, but I knew what it meant)
The chart was not just about me. It was about them—the girls I wrote to, danced with, flirted with, kissed, wanted, and often didn’t understand. But what mattered more than accuracy was the feeling of each entry. Was it a high point? A crash? A stall? Every rise and fall was logged and painted.
At the bottom, I used coloured blocks—red for heat, blue for distance, green for equilibrium. I had invented my emotional weather system.
The inked graph line darts and skitters across these colors, each spike and dip an externalised cry of teenage despair or delight.
Looking at it, I can reconstruct the architecture of feeling that defined my 17th year—the dizzying summit when love was returned, the plunge when it all fell apart, and the plateau of numbness that followed. It is a topographical map of a heart’s landscape, carefully charted by a wounded yet hopeful young explorer of emotions who was keeping a diary, writing and receiving love letters, drawing anyone who would sit still for long enough (especially girls), writing poetry and picking out tunes on a guitar.
In Another Time
Sometimes, I imagine how this hand-drawn chart would be perceived if discovered again. Had it been made in 1928 or 1878, it would lie pressed between letters from the Western Front or dispatches from distant colonies, waiting to be deciphered by historians. I’ve read wartime exchanges in the Liddle Archive, Leeds. Love was fleeting. The prospect of death sped things up. People made commitments. The letters read had people returning. Otherwise, the archive would not exist, I am sure. A bundle of letters kept once someone has died is tragic. A bundle of letters passed to an archive by a granddaughter or great-nephew shows that many returned to make a life.
One can envision a museum exhibit titled Love and Longing Across the Ages. In a glass case, a bundle of sepia-toned letters from a World War I soldier to his sweetheart might rest beside a colonial-era diary from 1878, its pages filled with yearning for home. Next to them, this very Love Chart—anachronistic yet kindred—would be displayed as an emotional artifact. How curious it would seem to those earlier generations: a personal graph of heartbreak, as if some young soul had applied scientific rigor to the chaos of love.
In that imagined archive, the chart would be studied with the same care given to a war letter or a Victorian diary. A curator’s placard might read: “Unknown teenager, England, 1978—ink and watercolor on paper. An intimate chart mapping the rise and fall of a first romance, analogous to diary entries or love letters in its attempt to preserve fleeting feeling” Interpreted alongside letters written in elegant cursive or telegrams of longing, the chart would underscore a truth that spans eras: heartache is timeless. Whether in a flowing fountain pen script or a spiky drawn graph, the impulse to record the pain of separation and the hope of reunion is a common thread in the human story. In this context, the Love Chart becomes not just a teenage oddity but a historical testimony—evidence that even in an age of disco and Polaroids, a young person’s inner life could produce an artifact as poignant as any bundle of 19th-century love letters.
An Analog Relic in a Digital World
In today’s world, this chart is rare. It remains an analog artifact in an era when teenage emotions are more frequently expressed through text messages or fleeting social media posts than through meticulously painted on paper. The very act of hand-writing one’s feelings, of creating a physical object to convey anguish, feels almost antiquated now. “Handwritten letters are relics… the art of letter writing is disappearing,” one commentator remarked recently.
Indeed, personal mementos like this chart seem increasingly scarce when one in 10 children today has never even written a letter with pen and paper.
We live in an age where heartbreak is more likely expressed in a late-night text or a fleeting Instagram story than preserved in a tangible keepsake. In the era of Snapchat and TikTok, who would take the time to create a meticulous chart of love and loss as I did in 1978?
The vanishing of analog expression lends the Love Chart an additional aura of importance. It is a survivor from a time when feelings often took physical form—ink on paper, words in a diary, and mixtapes of sorrowful songs. Unlike a deleted email or an old Facebook post lost to algorithmic oblivion, this chart retains its memory in its material. The creases and faded colors chronicle the years that have passed. Every smudge of ink is a testament to the hands that held it and the tears that may have fallen on it. It amazes me that had I not saved it, all those intense feelings might now exist only as vague recollections. But here they are, archived with intention. In a sense, I was my archivist at 17—determined to capture and preserve the architecture of my feelings on that autumn afternoon when my teenage self sat on the bedroom floor with rulers and paint, translating heartache into data points.
Mapping the Inner Turmoil
The Love Chart was my way of making sense of emotional chaos. At seventeen, overwhelmed by the intensity of first love and its collapse, I turned to sheets of paper to draw and create charts, compose poetry, and jot entries into a diary. It wasn’t turning 16 that kicked it off; it was turning 16½ and an awakening during an Easter holiday on the verge of escaping, once and for all, the strictures of an all-male boarding school in the middle of nowhere. It might as well have been on the moon, given its 90-mile distance from home.
For one curious month, September, during my first weeks at a day school after nine years ensconced in junior then senior ‘posh prison’. First, posh junior detention, known to some as boarding prep-school, then boarding ‘public’ school). Neither had the magic or love of Hogwarts; there were no girls, and most of the teachers were about as valuable to a racing car driver as a traffic warden. The diary sprawled across reams of paper. It was filled with bus tickets, bills, concert tickets, and sweet wrappers. I don’t need to Google to remember what was playing at the Theatre Royal or the University Playhouse or how much a Mars Bar costs. The realisation of what I was missing stunned me. I wouldn’t wish boarding school on anyone, not a boy or girl, indeed not at the age of 8. You become a prisoner on leave every holiday, filled with desperation as the clock ticks, dictating your every move and counter-move. Girls away at school, Casterton, Heathfield, Cheltenham’s Ladys’ College and Roedean come to mind. Girls from these institutions, rare and as damaged as you were, were a rare encounter, often to be clung to, the two of you like shipwrecked sailors lashed to a clipper that’s going down in a flat calm.
Each axis and line was a desperate attempt at order—if I could plot the sorrow, perhaps I could contain it. On the x-axis, I penciled in days and weeks; on the y-axis, I created a scale of heartache and hope. When I fell in love that Easter, the line on the chart soared upward, point by point. I recall marking a peak on the night of our first kiss, a euphoric high noted with a tiny star and the words “She loves me?” scribbled hopefully. Then, the tremors of doubt and jealousy began to disturb the line. A jagged drop in the graph marks an argument in early autumn; beside it, in blue ink, I see my note, “Why won’t she call?” Soon after, the line plunges like a cliff—my first heartbreak. The bottom of that chasm is circled in red, dated November 1978, captioned simply: “Goodbye.” It was my fault. My enthusiasm early in the year was like a little dog off its leash, running around the park, sniffing at everything that moved. Sorry. The metaphor works, though. Eagerness with little sense of propriety and a mother fielding phone calls. Which makes for another of the trials of the last century. The phone was in a red box in the street or the hallway, ours with a padlock on the dial as Mum was fed up with her four children sitting on the phone all day to friends who lived in other countries, let alone a few hundred miles away.
Charting these moments did not stop the tears but gave me strange solace. I remember the act of drawing as almost meditative: ruler in one hand, pen in the other, measuring out my grief. I never contemplated anything as drastic as ‘ending it all’ and though the pits of misery say ‘hate’ this was internally directed, I hated myself for my mistakes. My impatience. A kiss today was worth too much to spoil with further kisses with anyone who fancied it the next day or the day after that. But, hey, you have to learn how to do these things somewhere. It wasn’t as if ‘kissing’ was on the school syllabus, and sex education was a condom and a banana in a lecture hall full of boys in the upper sixth long after the horse had bolted from the barn as it were.
In those hours of quietly shading watercolor bands to represent phases—denial, anger, hope, despair—I was externalising pain onto the page. The internal tempest became an outline I could look at, something outside of me rather than just a storm within. It was as if, by seeing the shape of my sorrow, I could start to understand it. This homemade graph was a map through the storm, showing that my feelings had a trajectory: they rose and fell and might rise again. In a decade dominated by emotional rock ballads and handwritten journals, my painted chart was unusual, but it was as sincere an outpouring as any song lyric or diary entry.
The Architecture of Feeling
Nearly five decades later, I see this chart as more than youthful curiosity; it was the foundation for a lifelong fascination. At the time, I had no inkling that my impulse to chart my heart would foreshadow a career exploring emotion and memory. Yet here I am, a grown man who still ponders the structure of his feelings from when I was a boy. Being a teenager was so much more fun, and as my grandfather often told us, ‘Enjoy yourself while you’re young.’ This came from a man who went to work (Saturdays included) the day after his 14th birthday and later served on both ground and air during the First World War, emerging as a 22-year-old who returned to work, where he remained until retirement at age 63. He also used to say, ‘Your teeth are your pearls. ‘I have good teeth, by the way, and took this ‘have fun while you’re young’ to heart, maintaining the fun vibe for a few more decades than was perhaps wise.
In some ways, that 17-year-old heartbreak chart was my first lesson in emotional archaeology: I learned that feelings leave artifacts, traces we can examine and learn from. It set me on a path of diligent journaling through the years, saving old letters and emails, and always trying to discern patterns in life’s ups and downs. The architecture of feeling became a guiding concept in my life—I came to believe that every emotion we experience has a design, a landscape we can map, if only we pay close enough attention.
Standing here in my sixties (I stand at my desk; if I sit for too long, I fall asleep, and there’s no telling where my dreams will take me, usually off on a tangent). I hold the Love Chart as both a mirror and a window. A mirror because it reflects the boy I once was—earnest, creative, and easily overwhelmed by love—and a window because, through it, I glimpse the enduring human story of longing and loss. The chart is robust. I’m a diligent archivist. There are envelopes containing letters from 1967 and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, all inside sealed plastic boxes with an old sock stuffed full of silica gel to keep everything as dry as a bone. I read letters opened once four or five decades ago that look like they landed on the doorstep yesterday, except no one receives handwritten letters anymore, and a first class stamp costs more than 7p.
We forget so much as time passes; feelings that once consumed us entirely can fade or distort. This chart moves me now: it anchors a piece of my past in something concrete and beautiful. It captures a raw, formative moment in my life with an honesty and simplicity that my memory alone might not have preserved.
There is undeniable beauty in this handmade, emotional record. In an age where so much of our emotional life is intangible, stored in cloud servers or lost in the haste of digital communication, the Love Chart stands out as something profoundly human. It is imperfect and handmade—smudged ink, uneven lines—but therein lies its soul. It carries the imprint of its maker (my younger self) in every stroke. It speaks to the universal experience of a broken heart and an individual’s creative response to that experience.
I want to recreate this Love Chart across a warehouse wall, my 1978 from Tuesday, 28th March to New Year’s Eve. There were tears. There were upsets. There were discoveries. Hearts bled. I’m not blameless. A chance glance at the Love Chart isn’t my feelings for one person; it is my feelings for many people who fall out and are laid bare. It heart, you drag yourself through nettles and brambles to find a den where love grows only to find the endure edifice will collapse at the slightest wispy of scullerduggery and the watchword of every teen ‘two-timing’. Which meant just looking at another girl, not a kiss or a marginally grander snog.
As I place the chart back, I spray mount it onto the mounting board and tuck it safely into a plastic sleeve to lay flat amongst art, my ink pen drawings and relief prints. It might one day be found by my grandchildren or even in an archive of 20th-century ephemera. What will they make of it? Perhaps they will marvel at how their grandfather’s teenage sorrow took this colorful, charted form. I wonder, too, if they’ll laugh at all the unnecessary pain, given how everything today is transparent, projected, and scrutinised. Safety today is not in ‘playing the field’ (now there’s an expression I’ve not heard in half a century) but in making careful choices as whatever goes on could be tracked, shared, and commented upon. As ‘adolesecnce’ hits our screens I wonder if the shitfest that some adults seem to think is teen relationships is the case for the majority who find guidance online that is helpful and tender, not hateful and violent.
Perhaps a historian of emotions in some distant future will study it alongside the diary entries, love letters, and breakup notes of its time and smile at the unique way one boy tried to make sense of love. In any case, the Love Chart will remain my testament that feelings—no matter how ephemeral—do leave footprints. Sometimes those footprints are letters on a page; sometimes they are melodies in a song; and sometimes they are a painted graph hidden in a box for fifty years, quietly telling a story of heartbreak and healing.
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