I've just got around to putting Just the Way You Are by Billy Joel onto my iPod. While the short-term analysis of the song could be that it is a criticism of perfection, albeit in the best possible way, it's still pretty much the perfect love song. It says exactly what you would want to hear from your partner: that they don't want you to change your hair and they don't wish you were smarter and they don't want you to go trying "some new fashion". To them you are perfect. They couldn't love you any more than they do.

Billy Joel wrote Just the Way You Are about his then-wife and manager, Elizabeth Weber (who he then went on to divorce, four years later). He's saying that he loves her because she's not perfect and that he could never leave her in times of trouble. The fact that they didn't stay together seems to make the song even more poignant.

When I got back from New York I was nowhere near being over my ex-boyfriend, Will (we had broken up just before I left.) Shortly after I moved in with Vix I asked her to look after all the little notes, love-letters and emails Will had written to me when we were together as I had a tendency to wake up in the middle of the night, read them and make myself really upset.

It took me almost a year to properly get over Will. It was in February of this year. I knew when I received an email from him and for the first time ever my heart didn't flip - I just loved him as a friend. That feeling of emotional release is such an amazing sensation. For so long I thought that I was never going to get over Will, that I would never meet anyone like him and that I would always love him from afar. Then suddenly I realised that I had moved on.

Yesterday I remembered those notes and decided to ask Vix for them back, lest they got lost in the annals of time! Aside from a Valentines Day card and a couple of emails, the notes mainly consist of musings that he would have written before leaving for work and then left on his pillow for me to find (he is a nurse and often starts at around 6am.) Obviously I'm not going to write them all out for you, because they're private, but one of them that I looked at yesterday read, simply:

No morning is a bad morning when I wake up next to you. I love you. W.

In his book Sex, Lies and Cocoapuffs, Chuck Klosterman talks about how songs like Just the Way You Are make him think about all of the perfectly romantic emails and notes he has written over the years for various girlfriends, each of them proclaiming his profound and enduring love.

Like him, in a way I hate the fact that those notes and emails that I penned for Will are still out there somewhere. Not because I didn't mean them when I wrote them, but because I meant them when I wrote them.

The good thing is that they are all a reminder that I have felt love and that I have been loved and that very possibly I'll feel it all again some day.