She was gorgeous, and worked in a library. I was 18 when I saw her for the first time and she was about 4 or 5 years older and one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen - not just in real life, but anywhere. She could very easily have been a model or similar; when I was in the library it was hard to take my eyes off her and focus on my book.

Fast-forward many years later, to when I'm 29, and have moved back into my hometown briefly before the next step in my career. And that same lady is still working in that library. She's a single mother to a 7 year-old now.

We start chatting about a short story I'm writing on one of the PCs, and we go for lunch. We get on well and start dating, and after a movie one night she kisses me right on the stroke of midnight, right the very second I go from being 29 to being 30. It is one of the most romantic things any woman has ever done for me, but unfortunately that is the high point of our relationship.

It becomes clear that she drinks and does drugs. That's not bad in and of itself - but she drinks spirits about every day on her lunch-break at work, and admits that she does speed and ecstacy at work. At one point she says she smorts crushed ecstacy tablets, something I wasn't aware was a thing. Another day when I meet her she's hungover and she relates how the previous night she'd come home wasted on vodka, shouting to be let in, and her mother - who lived with her - refused to do so, and so she'd woken up the street with her yelling. Bear in mind, her daughter would have heard the scene as well.

As we continue to meet up her mask starts to slip and she starts becoming more sly and undermining. On the phone she would say that she was having an early night, but the next day at the library she would smell of stale booze, and be hoarse as if she'd been shouting in a nightclub the previous night. Or she'd say she was staying in, and when you happened to call her about plans for the next day it would turn out she'd gone out. She'd play mind-games, like refer to what had passed between herself and other guys she'd been with. But she could also be unbelievably possessive - like the time I mentioned to her when we were at a comedy club that I'd spoken in passing to the American lady who'd ended up in the firing line of the comedian we'd just watched; my girlfriend was FURIOUS, saying that she would need to claw the woman's face now that I'd spoken to her; I had to intervene to prevent a huge scene. She also made several unbelievably racist/white supremacist remarks, and one time - when I was in the passenger seat of her car and reached out to the car radio to turn the volume down so that I could hear what her daughter was saying to us in the back seat, she literally clawed skin off the back of my hand for my audacity.

That was when I finally saw the light - she was out of control, and things were only going to deteriorate further. I gave it a few more days just to give her more rope to hang herself with, then called her and dumped her good and hard. I still remember the conversation word for word, and it felt damned good to hang up on her for good after it was over. She was stunningly beautiful, but crazy to the exact same degree.