Claire

I wrote this for posterity and for no other reason. In some small way this short piece might mean that Claire will never be forgotten, even if in a tiny corner of the Internet.

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When she kissed me my world fell from my feet. She was everything and I knew from the very instant our lips touched that she was the one.

The sad thing about finding the one is that most people don't even realise it. It's very difficult to know whether the person you're with is really the one unless you lose them. Once gone it's difficult or simply impossible to get them back.

When I was nineteen I met my 'one'. She wasn't the most pretty, the most voluptuous or the strongest woman but she made me feel like I'd won every lottery. With golden curls, the kindest eyes and a soft, gentle nature, she made me hers forever. I still remember the first night we spent together like it was last night, I wish it was last night.

Over time you're supposed to leave your baggage behind, but the baggage I carry for her is locked to me, so tightly chained to my leg that the shackle has become embedded like wire in the trunk of a still growing tree. The pain I feel to this day tears me up inside.

Of all the women I ever met, of all the beautiful women I had the honour of falling in love with, of everyone I’ve ever known, she meant the most. It's 25 years since she left me and I'm still not over her. I will never be over her. I've made my peace with the fact that I'll never be at peace. All I want to do is rip the world a new arsehole but it won't bring us back together.

We got engaged a month after meeting on the bank of the river Dee in Chester. When we decided to do it I was expecting to feel nervous. I thought it would be overwhelming, but all I felt was calm and happy. I wanted my life to be spent with her. I still do.

Greenish brown eyes, blonde hair, full cheeks, slim figure and tall as I remember. Memory fades and speaks lies but I still know her face like I was looking at my own. So lively and yet so demure, her temperament was well suited to her job of looking after children. I'd love to have had children with her. She'd have been a great mother.

So many times I told her to be more assertive, yet only once did I ever hear her raise her voice, and it was at me. I loved her for it. I loved her for many things. I love her still.

I still hear her voice, although over time It's faded in memory. If I could just speak to her, hold her hand, lay one kiss on her lips again, I'd be happy, but time has moved on and so has life.

During our short time together she told me of a time when a fortune teller told her she would meet a man in her eighteenth year and spend the rest of her life with him. We met 16 days before her nineteenth birthday. I was that man.

It's a cruel world and we can't ever know what will happen. All we can do is try to be ready when it does. I wasn't. It's unfair, but we play with the cards we're dealt.

I've felt guilty for years about not crying for her at her funeral but now twenty five years on I can't stop crying. Maybe I felt numb back then. I know I wanted to cry, to unleash the emotions I had inside, but none came. The only thing I can do about it now is feel guilty.

No one deserves to die at nineteen. No one deserves to lose anyone at that age either. Her parents didn't deserve to lose her and neither did her brother, or her friends.

The day was overcast. Grey clouds slowly slid by over a crowd of darkly dressed people. I wore a yellow tie at the request of her mother. Her parents were so nice, so welcoming to me. I couldn't have asked for a better family to become a part of. We all broke into little pieces when she left. I like the metaphor of shattered glass, and it really does feel like that. When glass shatters the tiny shards spread out, hiding in cracks and crevices. In the same way we break and title bits of us are lost forever. Even if we could find all of the pieces it's almost impossible to put it back as it was before, and even then the cracks would still show.

My cracks are showing now, I feel like I could break again at any moment but all I can do it try to hold myself together, gluing the mosaic of me as I go. Ernest Hemingway wrote "we are all broken, that's how the light gets in." I don't see any light through the cracks. All I see is darkness and all I feel is pain.

Over the years I've wished for it to end. I wanted so much to be put out of my misery but the call has so far been unheeded. I once heard someone say, "God is either all powerful but not all good, or all good but not all powerful." If there is a god, I tend to agree.

All I wanted was to be happy. When Claire died that happiness was taken away. Thoughts of suicide came and went but I was never brave enough, so I stew over the past hoping that when my time finally comes I'll see her face, hear her voice, touch her warm hand again.

When people say. "Time heals." They usually have no concept. Time has never healed my emotional wounds. They've been left to fester and are now putrid and raw. What time does is gives us the chance to adjust and attempt to cope, but it doesn't heal anything.

I'll cross my fingers that one day I'll meet her again, and that we will be given the chance to love each other more fully than we were able this time. She's always in my thoughts. My Claire.