Cloe Willets: The youngest Manchester victim, Saffie-Rose, 'reminds me of you'

If you were a number among the crowd, a statistic to the world, a victim, would someone take the time to wrap your wounds and hold you? Photo / AP

She reminds me of you.

The brunette hair pulled into a ponytail and the wisps of fringe lining her rounded eyes. They're brown like yours and innocent like yours, but equally filled with their own personality.

She was her own person and, at the age of eight, had the world ahead of her, like you.

I've held in tears today for her, Saffie-Rose, as I've poured over the dozens of stories marked with her face smiling into the lens, the image slightly grainy and likely taken from someone's social media page.

When I leave work today and you run towards me with your arms extended, Hazel, I think I'll hug you a little tighter, while I try to get her face out of my mind, where it's been sitting fogging my thoughts.

Maybe tonight, when I've done the usual night time routine and tucked you in to bed with a hot water bottle and you've lined your favourite stuffed animals across the pillow beside you, I'll read you an extra book as I stroke the brunette wisps of hair from your face.

Maybe I'll give in to the tears like the rest of the world, which is grieving for the face of the Manchester terrorist attack.

Unlike Saffie-Rose, many of the 22 victims' images still haven't been released for confused strangers to ponder over from behind computer screens, from all across the world.

To someone, Saffie-Rose was their world. Just like you are mine.

The Daily Telegraph UK described her as quiet and unassuming, with a creative flair. A little like you.

Maybe she too spent hours scribbling her vibrant imagination onto paper in coloured pen, or took 10 minutes too long in the bath just so her fingers would wrinkle.

Maybe, like you, she danced sporadically to her favourite music when no one was there, or rested her head in her mother's lap to watch television when she was tired.

My mind can't comprehend the magnitude of yesterday's event, let alone how her mother is feeling.

How do you comprehend the loss of a child, and in such a brutal and unjust way?

I wonder how I'd feel if, like Saffie-Rose's mother, my body lay injured from shrapnel in an unfamiliar hospital bed while you lay somewhere by yourself, gone, without me there.

I wonder whether someone like the young homeless man Chris Parker would be there to help you.

Chris, who had spent a year sleeping in the streets of Manchester before that day, when he cradled a dying woman in his arms as her body gave in to its injuries.

He helped a little girl who had lost her legs in the blast, as she asked for her mum.

I wonder how Chris' own mother would feel knowing he had jumped in to help those people in the foyer, where he usually begged at the end of concerts, despite having his own reasons to dislike the world.

I wonder whether she'd hold him a little closer too, if she could.

Would someone have held you, if it were you there among the hundreds scattering for safety?

The little girl who clings to me in unfamiliar settings, my little shadow, before the wall of your shell crumples down.

If you were a number among the crowd, a statistic to the world, a victim, would someone take the time to wrap your wounds and hold you, and brush the wisps of hair from your face?