I don’t know exactly how many days it’s been. I stopped recording them. My guess is more than three hundred. I’ve counted at least three seasons, based on the weather - out there. Darkness has been the most consistent reminder that what were once normal days have passed. Night-time arrives like an echo of something vaguely familiar — but which now feels less like an invitation to rest and more like an intrusion.

I continued to play my part every year with the performance of mince pies and carrots. I feigned excitement about what “Santa would bring.” And I pretended not to hear my brother’s annual reminders of the truth that he never wanted me to forget, as if I ever could. I knew I would be rewarded on Christmas Day for my silence in the plot.

I never realised until he died that grief makes you feel like a helpless child again, afraid of the monsters under the bed, crying out for a mother who will never come. Left only with the cold, empty space where love used to be.

Once upon a time, she was my best friend. My only friend, really. Looking back, she was my antagonist. I spent years believing we were like sisters. It took me a long time to realise she never considered me blood. The signs were all there — just clouded to eyes that hadn’t been trained with enough love to consider them relevant.

I reached for the sound of our laughter, hoping that their echoes might permeate my heart, but the walls refuse to speak. C.S Lewis very rightly said that he never realised grief feels so much like fear. But a person's nature is never one dimensional, and grief's is no different. I never realised that grief feels so much like motherhood.

There are deaths that fracture families, and then there are deaths that reveal fractures that were always there. His funeral should have been a place of gathering. Instead, it became a theatre of exile. One coffin. Five wakes. And the clear announcement that I did not belong anywhere.

Nearly twenty years later, I can still feel the weight pressing down on my teenage chest — a weight left behind from a devastating absence, the hopeless feeling that something vital had left not just my body but my soul. That the fight in me was gone.

I was breaking every rule I’d ever been told to follow. It was intoxicating and terrifying. That trip wasn’t just about cigarettes or punishment. It was the first time I glimpsed who I might become, even if I was still terrified of it.

If you asked me how many men have tried to kill me, I’d probably laugh before I answered. Then I’d start counting.

We carry on amid the chaos, pretending it’s outside us, over there…somewhere. So we make Plans. Plans are for the future. Plans are good. We should all have Plans. But we live every day as if death only turns up at other people’s bedsides.

In the beginning I didn’t have to remind him about cards, or dinner plans, or what anniversaries meant. We didn't care. Later I did. Later still, I stopped.

You’ll never be her again. You’ll never have that same sparkle in your eye. You’ll never feel that same love in your heart, the kind that fills you when you’ve met the person you want to spend your life with, and they’re here next to you, holding you in their arms. When your soulmate dies, and you have to carry on with the rest of your life, it does something irreversible to you.

Over the years, a particular kind of rage begins to settle in you: petty, feral, and fierce. It’s the voice that wants to choke the person in front of you in the queue with a bag of Maltesers because they’re taking too long. The same rage that wanted to smash Mr. Soft-Top’s phone into breadcrumbs. It sounds ridiculous until you realise the Maltesers and Mr Soft-Top aren’t the problem. They’re just the final straw in a world that’s made us swallow too much.

How do you cope with the death of someone you can’t live without? Honestly? You don’t. Life feels impossible. Unbearable. You feel like the pain is going to kill you. Actually going to kill you.

To my youthful and inexperienced eyes, Jordan Knight looked like a gorgeous Italian man had eaten James Dean and then birthed a beautiful hybrid Adonis. (Jordan’s Canadian, as it turns out, but this was my fantasy after all.) Now, nearly forty years later, as I search for him on Google, Jordan Knight just looks like just another bloke called Dave…and I wonder if I might finally have a chance.