AS LONG AS SHE NEEDS ME

For the first year of their relationship together it was sunny every day, or at least that was how it seemed at the time.

The bad weather came later.

But for that first halycon year, it felt as if paradise on earth had been proved entirely possible.

The beauty and energy she possessed was like Carmen, Brigitte Bardot and Scarlett Johansson rolled into one. Men and women would gravitate toward her magnetic aura at social events and in the streets where she would occasionally busk singing songs by Amy MacDonald, Joan Baez and original compositions of her own. Children also found her magical personality irresistible as she was as much a child as she was a woman.

For her admirers she was the flame they were all drawn to.

He was no different, although over time he preferred to think of himself as the fuel that kept her light burning bright even when the darkness threatened to snuff it out entirely.

"In my darkest hour, I think of you," she once said to him on a late night telephone call from Spain many years after when they were no longer together. In retrospect, he felt as if their unique connection was too big to exist within the conventional framework of a relationship, or perhaps that was his justification for admitting defeat when it came to the insurmountable obstacle that broke their happy life together.

What was it about life, he thought, that you can never retain true contentment for long? There was always something that would torpedo any type of bliss you found for yourself.

It could be illness; it could be financial.

In their case however, it was madness.

Oh, the wind whistles down
The cold dark street tonight
And the people, they were dancing
To the music vibe

Whenever she would stay over, a guitar or cello would accompany her. He found it reassuring that she found music such an inspiration. He felt exactly the same way.

But when disaster struck, music was the first casualty, suddenly and noticeably absent from their lives.

The abrupt transition from heaven to hell came within a time frame of 24 hours, after she'd been performing the entire weekend at a music festival and the crazy thing was he never saw it coming until it was too late.

Maybe the warning signs were there all along but he was too bedazzled with all the things that were working for them to see any potential pitfalls in the road up ahead.

But when it all eventually fell apart, it was like something out of a horror movie, one that still gave him nightmares long after they'd separated. He'd often replay events that led up to her breakdown and think what he could have done to prevent it. But just as with natural disasters, you couldn't predict or control these things. It was quite simply beyond his abilities as much as he'd wanted to protect her from the demons that preyed on her from within the confines of her head.

It was in the early hours of the morning when she suddenly started talking in a strange manner, nothing making any real sense, demonstrating an apparent collision between fleeting lucidity and rambling delusion.

His first thought was that it might be a drug she'd been spiked with, although there was just something eerily familiar about her behaviour and he found it most disturbing recognising it.

Years before, he'd known a woman who came to believe that she was a reincarnated druid princess which had tragically ended with her throwing herself off a bridge and leaving her young child motherless.

He hoped in this instance, his partner's sanity would return with the early dawn, but the daylight only made it even more clear the madness was not a trick of the night. The person he'd known 24 hours before was now besieged by some shadow of past traumas previously swept under the carpet.

"Nothing you're saying is making any sense," was perhaps the cruellest thing he'd ever said to her, especially as in her manic state the abrupt shock of shattering her sense of security with her delusions could be fraught with danger, like waking a sleepwalker.

But just like an unwelcome intruder in the night, the madness was here to stay and he had to re-adjust to the new reality as it appeared before him.

By winter of that year, she had returned from a disrupted term at university to her mother's house who was away travelling in Africa. Snow fell all around the garden as thick and deep as her depression and he could do nothing more than make sure there was food in the cupboard and hot drinks left for her on the stairs.

Week by week he worked away in the kitchen below where she slept as the regional radio station played endless Motown tunes and he wrote for a work deadline, hoping his consistency at maintaining routine would provide some sort of comfort for her troubled mind.

The shift in energy from her summer mania to winter catatonia was yet another twist in this uncertain tale, and only on rare occasion would she emerge from her bedroom, a shadow of her former radiant self.

When spring finally returned the following year, he hoped for a shift within her and that the season of renewal might provide fresh impetus, but she remained securely locked inside the prison fortress of her mind and he could find no way to break her free from it no matter hard he tried.

Eventually, his role in the relationship became more of an observer than a participant and yet she had enough strength of mind to tell him that he didn't need to wait for her while she remained ill.

He never left her, but the distance between them increased over time. She knew deep down that the only person who could get her out of the mental labyrinth she was currently lost in was herself.

And in the end, she did recover some part of what she'd lost that summer, and better days returned, but their relationship was the price they paid at the toll on that broken road.