This one was particularly horrifying. It started with my daughter’s best pal Victoria, she was standing in my living room and we were jokingly mocking her about a boy she had met. She took it badly and ran into my bedroom and climbed onto my bed and opened our big window. We live on the top floor. I watched as she climbed backwards through the window and held on with both hands onto the frame, screaming she was going to let herself go.

My daughter was standing on the bed begging her to come back in and for some reason I could hear my husband down in the back car park shouting at her to stop the nonsense.

In the moment I stood there I felt the utter depth of her soul and I actually understood her need to let go, in between all the screaming and watching my daughter beg her to stop, I actually felt the horror of Victoria’s pain. It was disgusting and hollow.

Like a bottomless pit in my stomach. That one second of her pain was revealed to me like she had transferred all her deepest fears and sorrow to me in one glance and my soul had sucked it in and let it penetrate my heart.

Victoria just closed her eyes and let herself go out of the window. My daughter Ashley fell on the bed hysterical and wept. I ran out of the bedroom and ran about panicking then ran back into the bedroom and the scene that faced me made my heart stop. Ashley was standing up on the window ledge, she made eye contact with me, and she never spoke, she smiled and her eyes twinkled and then she waved, and then let herself drop into the emptiness.

I ran to the window paralysed with fear and watched her fall and then she bounced off a parked car and her broken dead body lay stiffly beside her friend Victoria who was splattered all over the concrete. My husband was screaming as his daughter lay in the backyard dead.

I woke up screaming and ran into Ashley’s room and there she was all sleepy and tangled up in her duvet. Her favourite teddy was snuggled up in her arms and her dark hair was spread around her head like a dark wavy halo. Her pale face was serene, her dark eyelashes sat thickly on her cheeks and that beautiful pouting rose coloured mouth made her look like a baby.

I stood in the silence of her bedroom and watched her for a few moments.

I was recalling the sheer horror that I had felt seconds ago and knew in that moment that if she died I would have to go to my death to; I couldn’t bear to live my life without knowing she was there.

I know grief, I felt it last week.

The rest of the fringe will be piss easy. I have my daughter safely hugging me as I write this. Life is good.