If you are reading this, there's most likely something seriously wrong with you. Oh well, here goes...

I guess my story really begins with my first memory. There was a really bright light, and then someone hit me. No, scratch that, I guess I'd better start this with my second real life-changer. This would be when I first fell in love, five years ago.

To paraphrase the inestimable Stephen Fry, my entire life was split into two areas. There was Before Nicky, and there was After Nicky. As soon as we met, I felt a connection, something so powerful that it transposed all physical laws. Even the obscure ones like Chandrasekhar's Law of Supermassive Densities.

That's what love feels like. My whole world went into shock at this apparition.

And just in case you're wondering, Nicky was short for Nicholas. Yes, I'm gay. So was he. People are. And I wish to hell that society would get the hell over it.

Because you see, my third true until-the-end-of-time memory is about Nicky too.

I live in a small suburb in England, and where this suburb was, was a hell of a lot of hateful, shameful, know-nothing bastards. The kind of shit one usually finds either locked up or preaching in the Westboro Baptist Church (they of GodHatesFags.com infamy). And they indoctrinated their children in the belief that homosexuality was sinful and wicked and killing them was merely God's work.

We were coming back from a club. I forget the name, but I don't forget anything else. Nicky was wearing his favourite stuff - tight black Kasabian T-shirt, navy blue jeans, black Sergeant Pepper jacket with silver trim - and I was just in an old blue tee and black denim shorts.

We turn a corner (I'm not going to give street names). A bunch of chav kids are there waiting for us. There must be around thirty of them, and they're all carrying baseball bats, knives, all kinds of shit. We try to turn back, but they surround us. All of these kids are from the neighbourhood where I live.

And then I see that some of them aren't kids at all, but their parents. But I don't have time to put names to faces, because the charge forward and attack.

Next thing I know, it's two weeks later and I'm in hospital looking up into Nicky's mother's face. There are tears in her eyes. and she tells me what happened.

These people - but that implies they are people, and there is no human word for what they are - battered us and suddenly left us for dead. An old lady heard what was going on and phoned the ambulance and the police.

I was in a really deep coma. I had to be fed through a tube, I had to be bathed and cleaned in my own bed. I felt worthless.

"But what about Nicky? Where is he?"

And that was when she started crying.

For, not two hours before I had woken up, Nicky had had a heart atack whilst he was in a coma. The doctors tried to resuscitate him, but they had failed. Nicky was pronounced dead at 5:15 pm on the 3rd May, 2005.

I felt ... well, I don't there is a word for how I felt. Perhaps an work of art somewhere, where some unknown painter took the feeling of sorrow and hurled it onto a canvas to try and make the pain go away. But for me, it never did. Nicky was gone and I wasn't.

I think I threw up. I cried for hours. In truth, I don't think I've ever really stopped. Every time I close my eyes I see him, calling to me, asking me why I had lived when he had not.

The funeral was three weeks later. I gave a speech. I don't recall it. I threw in my handful of earth over this box, this wooden casket that contained my beloved.

Apparently, I spent months sedated in a mental asylum. All I know now is that I still sometimes burst into tears, when I can't stop the floods of pain and sadness and the longing I have for his touch or his smile or his warmth against mine. I can never stop it.

But I had to move on. I found a new life, working as an investment banker's secretary in the City (London's financial area). I have a flat in Hackney. I have a stable boyfriend and a circle of friends. I'm OK now.

And still I remember Nicky's epitaph:-
"A heart at peace, under an English heaven."

I think of Nicky like that. Always.