This one is a bit of a strange one – it is a song that has always made me think about Maddie, but doesn’t really fit into our story at all.

It is about the battle that love can sometimes be – the battles to find love, the battles to keep love, the battles we go through when we lose love.

While she and I have never been together, there has never really been any kind of battle between us. Yes, we had our struggles as friends when I struggled to admit my feelings at high school – but this just feels disconnected from our relationship.

Yet it still makes me think of her – so here it is.

Time for another musical moment, and another entry from my spirit animal Richard Marx.

This is a bitter sweet one for me – it sums up perfectly how I feel about Maddie – but I see two completely different sides to the lyrics, and from that two completely different sides of me and my love for her.

I listen and hear myself singing these words to her, yet in real life I would be be utterly terrified to express those words.

Maddie obviously knows that I care deeply for her, and she cares deeply for me – but there is almost an unwritten law between us that we would never use the “love” word. She knows I am alive, just not how much my love is alive.

That’s the context in which I place those lyrics.

It’s everything I would say, but would probably never be able to say.

In recent years, I have spent an hour commuting to and from work every day.

After a while, a commute like that blends together day after day, and the drive becomes almost automatic in a way – it gives me a lot of time to think about a lot of things.

Often, I still think of Maddie a lot of those times. I often “talk to her” as if she is sitting in the passenger seat next to me.

She often “asks me” how much I think about her – and this is the song that fits.

I’ve always found the lyrics so clever – the voice talks about all the different times he thinks about the woman he loves – and then as the song nears the end, he realises:

“Well, I’m always thinking of you, it’s all that I can do…”

Perfect.

Another step away from the story today – for another musical moment.

The relationship between Maddie and I has changed so many times in so many different ways over the nearly 40 years we have known each other. We’ve always managed to stay friends, and even though it has seemed a number of times that we were going to end up together, it’s never quite happened.

Whenever I have been single, and I’ve been struggling – (which given my history of mental health issues has been a lot of times) – I think of Maddie.

She is a lighthouse on my journey. She is my true north. My guiding star.

I’ve also had to watch her go through any number of different relationships herself, sometimes with a level of jealousy – not liking some of the guys she has been with. I’ve known and been introduced to several of them over the years.

I’m honestly always happy for her, but sad for me.

And when I have been at my loneliest, when I’ve needed her the most – because of that artificial distance between us, I couldn’t go to her. I had to go back to the beginning and watch her from a distance.

And cry.

I heard this song in the car on the way home from work one night 4 or 5 years ago, on a night I probably needed her the most I have ever needed her. It broke me.

I’m choosing to do something a little different for this post – a step away from the story of Maddie and me for a moment, and a touch of music that doesn’t really fit into any specific part of our story.

For all of the story episodes, the music I have placed at the bottom directly relate to the mood, the feelings I have about the events in those episodes, or even almost exactly tell those stories – at least how they live in my mind.

Sometimes they are songs that were popular and current at the time the episode describes.

Sometimes the song came later, and sometimes a long time before. In these cases the song came along and coloured in the story for me.

Sometimes a song appears that doesn’t really fit anywhere at all, and are a more general representation of how I’ve felt about Maddie over the years.

I only recently discovered this song – even though it came out in 1990. A recent stream of thoughts about Maddie, about whether it is time to let her go bubbled up with this song. Over the space of about a week – (despite it being a 34 year old song) – I heard it about five times.

That felt like I was being told something, and despite all of the years of loving and caring for Maddie, there have been plenty of times I’ve wondered if I should just let her go.