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I remember the first time I met Iago Boyd.
I loved him before we even spoke. He wasn't aware at the time, nor was I in fact. He was beautiful, a sculpture of innocence. His boyishness and naivety wooed me into a playful security. I wasn't the first that loved him, by far. But I was the first that he loved back.

There are certain stages in life where it's too risky to make the move, too scary to speak first and get it wrong. A horrid moment where all confidence crumples into a forlorn heap and you find yourself playing it cool, pretending you know what you're doing and then saying something utterly humiliating, crippling. This never happened with Iago. I remember the first time I heard his name. It confirmed my love, my infatuation now had a name.

On our first meeting I remember his face, I couldn't stop looking. Just glaring at his expressions, his details. I remember his eyes, they were familiar. Honest and trusting, although he always held a spark of childlike humour. His lips were so stunning, perfectly stunning. I just wanted to touch them. I remember thinking on that first meeting if it would be weird if I just touched his face, his lips. I very much doubt I was paying much attention to what he was saying. Just seeing his lips move, creating words, vowels and sounds.

It was winter in 2005 when we met. Through a friend. 'You have to meet Iago, you two would get on so well together' she said before walking to the far end of a quiet café where this exotic figure was sitting. He was reading. It was 'The picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde. And I was in love.

It wasn't something that was planned, these things never are, but from the moment we were introduced I wished it was. That I had, but I've been told on many occasions that love is never planned, it cannot be planned and never will be. I was unaware of love at first, I was waiting for that flipping sensation, those infamous butterflies. They never came, but it turns out they don't need to in order to change you, make you love. To make you loved.

We chatted about simple things, made conversation, always with a kind of sensitivity between each other. As though we knew something was going to happen, as though something was happening. I remember that feeling clearly, an awareness that I can't say I had noticed before, or since. It was almost like looking at the situation from the outside. That's the only way I can describe it. Watching myself fall in love!

In a way I wish I had known. Wish I was warned, about love, that I was falling in love. Perhaps then I would have touched his lips, felt his skin. I wouldn't care, I would be in love.

We met several times in that same café, it became our place of seclusion. I would meet him there and talk, just talk and talk for hours, coffee after coffee. I would listen to him, every word. Sharing thoughts, pulling apart opinions. We spoke about Chaplin and Keaton. About Garbo and Deitrich. About Coco Chanel. We had both fallen in love with a world before our own. A time that could never be repeated. It was an era of class and seduction we both longed to be a part of. A fantasy land, a security and nostalgia that was only fuelled by his shared love of it. I suppose I loved it, we loved it together, this timeless place because it was exactly that, timeless. It had already taken place. The future of this fantasy was already made, it was safe. A security. Something we clearly both needed. We fed off each other's enthusiasm for cinema and classicism among other things.

I grew to know him in that world we had created. In that café, always on the same table. I grew to learn his endless personality, his charm, his confidence, his fragility. It was safety we had found in each other, someone beautiful to confide in. I needed him, and he needed me.

It became a very separate relationship from anything that I had experienced before. It was very close, secluded. I was very aware that it was just the two of us, no one swayed our opinions of each other. A very trusting and exclusive relationship. It stayed that way, safe and comfortable for a long time. I was the only one in his world. It was perfect. We were perfect. Together.

Thinking back on us, the two of us, I can't pin point a time where I was not happy. Where I wasn't content because of my situation. Because of him. The kind of contentment that just happens, that just takes place. We didn't have to try to become what we did. There was a natural comfort between us. We never spoke of it, there was no need to.

I remember getting the train with him to a small village one day for a book market. It was bitterly cold. The sky was no particular colour, a greyish white. Almost like it wasn't there, like we were under a sheet. We didn't speak for all of the journey. A familiarity between us that didn't need words. We sat opposite each other and watched out of the window. I always found looking out of train windows intriguing, inviting almost. Like looking into someone's house, watching them in their front room. I was thinking of a shoot in my head. Using the landscape of endless fields we were passing as a backdrop. A blanket of dull greens and browns with whites peppered every now and then due to the rough chalk in the soil.

I remember looking across at him, his face was so fresh yet brutal and sullen too. It was his expression, just the curl in his lips or the furrow in his brow that made it impossible to look away.
'What a magnificent man' I thought. For an instant he looked like my father, and I loved him more.

At this church where the book market was being held we wandered, separated and wound our way around the open hall littered with tables and stalls. There were mountains of books, rows and rows of crumbling texts. Covers peeling off, like wrinkles around an old ladies mouth. They all told stories and whispered tales. It was one of those places where your stride slows down and you enjoy just wandering. Aimlessly meandering through. I could see his figure looking down to the ground, watching his feet as he walked.
I loved him more then too.

We didn't buy any books.

He was a great lover of literature. He would indulge in Woolfe or Hardy, burrow himself away with his hand at his mouth. It was his habit to feel the contours of his face with his fingers as he read. There was a comfort in it, like a child. An innocence. I would watch him in a chair, sunk deep into the back of a couch or sofa, his legs crossed, just reading. For hours, just reading. He would turn the page very precisely, very carefully. He was tentative and careful. It made me laugh sometimes. I would smile to myself and watch him. Sitting there, his mind absorbing words and lines after lines. It was at those moments that I was fond of him. I knew him, I knew his ways. There is something quite self achieving about knowing someone so well. A feeling of pride where it normally isn't applicable. But I loved him. I loved his ways.

'When you are in a position such as you are when you are in love there is very little you can do to suppress such a feeling' This my dear mother told me. It was like a piece of advice, a warning. To me it was an understatement. Love to me was a gushing flood of lust and wanting. An overwhelming passion. A need to be needed, a rich indulgence in someone else. To own and posses. To feel someone, to love them was more than an emotion, more than a feeling.
'To be sad is to feel' I told her ' to love is to be'.