My name is John Paul McQueen and three days ago I died.
Death can come to us in so many ways. There are the lucky ones get to slip away peacefully after a long and happy life, and then there are those who fight to hold on to every breath until the last of their strength is finally taken from them and they have nothing left to fight with.
Me? My death was neither of those things. It was sudden and unexpected. But maybe I should go back a few days before it happened and let you know who I was and what a life I once had.
Last week I was happy. Happier than I had ever thought I could be. I had had to struggle hard for that happiness but when I won it I knew it had been worth all the pain, all the lies and all the deceit.
You see a year ago I fell in love. Normally that would have been a joyous thing in itself. Falling in love is surely always something to celebrate, to cherish, but my love wasn't quite that simple.
My love came with some terrible complications.
Firstly I had fallen in love with my best friend.
Secondly I had to finally admit to the world, and to myself, that I was gay.
Thirdly, and this was the real hard part, I had to accept that this wonderful man I had fallen for would never see me as anything more than a friend. He was straight. He had a beautiful girlfriend. There was never any chance he would love me the way that I loved him and I had to learn to live with that. I had no choice.
Of course life has a funny way of messing with your head and just when I was moving on and putting my feelings for him away (or at least trying to) everything changed. He said loved me. He said wanted me. And when he kissed me I knew that I would never love anyone the way that I loved him.
So you see I had everything I ever wanted. Right there, wrapped up in a snowflake patterned cardigan was the only man I have ever loved and every time he touched me I felt complete.
But with that love came all the complications. You remember the pain and lies and deceit I mentioned? Well that's what loving him brought me for the longest time. Our love made me into a liar. I lied to our friends, my family, the man I was seeing, I lied to everyone and anyone as long as it meant I got to hold him and kiss him and make love to him.
For a while I even thought that it would be enough. That having him just sometimes would be enough. Of course it wasn't. Every time I saw him with his girlfriend it nearly killed me. I wanted to scream out to the world that he was mine, all mine, but how could I when he would look at me with those eyes and plead for a little more time. It was always a little more time. He would tell her tomorrow. How could I have forgotten that tomorrow is a day that never arrives?
In the end loving him made me cruel. I exposed our love in the cruellest way I could have imagined. I didn't plan it but after I had done it, after I had exposed what we had, I couldn't regret it. I had had enough of living a lie and I think in the end so had he.
I'm sure, for a while, he hated me for what I did, for the way I let his girlfriend know he wanted me more than her by letting her walk in on us. But I'm also sure he was grateful for what I did. Grateful that I ended the lies he seemed unable to so that we could finally be together. And we were.
Which brings me back to last week when I was happy.
I had the man of my dreams in my life and everybody knew. I wouldn't say everybody was happy for us, far from it, but they knew and we didn't have to hide anymore.
My name is John Paul McQueen and three days ago I died and I'd only just discovered what living really felt like.
I finally knew how it felt to be in love and to be loved and it was never, ever going to end.
We had our future all planned out and it was to begin in Dublin. His dream had always been to go to University there. My dream was to be with him so where else would I want to be but in Dublin by his side?
We were both packed and ready to go. I was so excited, more excited than I had ever been in my life because of him. He was my everything and I was his and nothing was ever going to spoil that. That's what I thought.
And then there came that life thing again, letting me believe that I had everything that I wanted and then showing me that maybe I didn't after all.
It sounds silly when you say it out loud. It seems inconceivable that anyone would walk away from what we had over something so simple. But that's exactly what I did.
Standing with him at the airport, waiting to start our new lives together, was when I asked him to do it, and when I realised that he couldn't. It wasn't that he didn't want to, or that he didn't love me, it was much deeper than that, much darker, much worse.
Standing, surrounded by people we didn't know and would never see again the man I loved couldn't kiss me. Not wouldn't. COULDN'T.
And that was when I knew I couldn't go with him.
I couldn't go back to being his secret again. I couldn't take that look of shame or embarrassment in his eyes if I tried to touch him. I couldn't live a lie again, not even for the man I loved. Not wouldn't. COULDN'T.
Three days ago I was standing at an airport with the man I loved and I turned and walked away.
That was the day my heart stopped beating, the day that I died.
My name is John Paul McQueen and three days ago I died. Now I just have to learn how to live again.
