Almost exactly a year on from that horrible day, something quite unexpected happened.

I think the day was a Tuesday, and the previous Friday I had been made redundant from my job. Quite a disappointment as it was a job that I loved, but sometimes these things just happen. As such I was sitting back in my cosy little unit on this particular morning, getting on with updating my resume to hit the job trail.

Tapping away at the keys, I heard that little tone that says a new email had arrived. I didn’t look at it straight away as I was working my way through a thought and didn’t want to stop typing. In fact, I completely forgot about it for some hours.

I had made and drunk several coffees, had lunch, and even had a nice hot shower – before sitting back down and doing some more work on my resume. Before long I heard that “new mail” tone once again.

This time I looked straight away – and it was just a follow up email from one of the recruiters I was talking to in the hope of getting back to work. I read it, and answered it.

It was then I noticed the email that had arrived hours ago and to this point had completely forgotten about. A first glance it looked like a piece of spam email and I was just about to delete it when I took a second glance – and that’s when something caught my eye.

There was no full name listed as the sender – just the email address. Which started with an “m”, followed by two further initials that matched Maddie’s initials. I blinked and looked again, as that combination of letters was a common thread in my head, not just because they matched Maddie’s initials, but because I often used her three initials in computer passwords.

They were embedded in my head almost every day.

So I took a closer look, and without reading the content jumped straight to the sign off at the bottom which just said “Love, Maddie”.

I was pretty depressed that I had lost my job a few days earlier, but I forgot all about that and started reading her email. It was short, but made my day.

Probably my week, almost certainly my month, and absolutely my year.

It had been almost 8 years since I had seen her last – that fleeting moment on the road on Boxing Day. I’d also heard absolutely nothing about where she was, or what she was doing. I just ached to hear anything from her or about her for that entire time.

Her email quickly spoke about how she’d been away overseas, and that she had just come back to Australia because she really felt it was time to be back close to her family again after “going through some stuff.”

There was one mystery though – how did she find my email address? I wasn’t in the habit of using it publicly – (I had another throw away email address for signing up to websites and the like) – but this one was my “private” email address that almost nobody knew.

To this day I don’t know who gave it to her – a few mutual friends knew it, so I’m guessing it was one of them, but that question was never answered, and didn’t even come up.

Frankly, I didn’t care – Maddie had come looking for me and she had found me!

I replied back quickly, probably gushing with a massive smile, and before long the emails were bouncing backwards and forwards. It wasn’t a lot more than small talk to be honest, but she was coming to town the next week to do her own job hunting since getting back to Australia and she asked if I wanted to catch up for a coffee and a chat.

Are you kidding? Hell yes – just tell me where and when!

We quickly picked a time and a place, and it was entered proudly into my calendar – “Coffee Date with Maddie”.

The email chain carried on for the rest of the week, a couple of emails a day generally. I asked about what she’d been doing, and how married life was.

“I never got married, it fell apart pretty quickly,” was her response.

Hmm.

“I took off overseas to get away from the bullshit, and I’ve only just decided to come home. I had the shit scared out of me on September 11th last year.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was visiting New York with a friend because neither of us had ever been. September 11th was going to be our last day, and we’d left our luggage at the hotel after checking out to do a final few hours of sightseeing before flying out – and we thought the World Trade Center observation deck might be somewhere to get a few good photos.”

I’m reading the email completely wide eyed at this point.

“We jumped on a subway train to head towards the WTC, but the train stopped a couple of stops away from there, and everyone was told to get off because the trains were shutting down because of an incident at the WTC.”

“We emerged at street level and could see all the smoke spewing out of the building we were about to visit. We were literally just a few minutes from getting there. We saw the second plane hit, and we were terrified, like most people.”

“We thought we were far enough away, just a few blocks north, so we just stopped and watched in amazement of what we were seeing, and then the first tower to collapse came down. The cloud of dust started rushing between the buildings, and we just turned and ran. Ran and ran and ran back to our hotel. I don’t think we even looked back once.”

I think I left my body reading this – understanding how close Maddie came to perhaps being truly caught up in all that horror.

And then I remembered how I had felt while watching the events live that night.

“Gee, I hope Maddie is okay!” I thought on the night.

I had no idea that she was even overseas again, let alone in the US, let alone in New York.

Yet I had asked myself that night if she was okay, while watching it all unfold on television.

I replied to her email, still shaking. All I wanted to do was be close to her, and stay close to her always. I wanted to hold her and look after her after what she had been through.

“Maddie, can I tell you my story from that night?”

September 11, 2001 – a day anyone who was alive on that day will never forget.

I don’t want to minimise what happened that day for the many thousands of people who died or had their lives ripped apart, but events of that day had a major effect on me.

I just didn’t know it at the time.

In Australia, the events of 9/11 happened during the late evening, just before 11pm. I was in the habit of watching the late news on television – (usually around 10:30pm on the main channels) – and then going to bed.

On this night, I had fallen asleep on the couch, and slept through till around 11:15pm, by which time both planes had already struck the twin towers in New York.

Whatever channel I was watching hadn’t started their late news yet, so I flicked over hoping to catch some on one of the other channels. Where I was confronted by the tragic events of that day.

Stunning. Indescribable.

I had actually been home sick from work that day, and still wasn’t feeling very well and was planning to take the following day off work as well. As such, sitting up and watching this once in a lifetime “event” wasn’t going to upset any work plans for the next day.

I just sat and watched for two or three hours. I saw the towers fall, and the flames at the Pentagon.

Then my head did something really weird.

“Gee, I hope Maddie is okay,” I thought to myself.

Wait, what?

Why had that come to my mind? Why had Maddie popped in there? It had been nearly seven years since I had seen or heard from her.

More than a year later, I would get my answer.

I was in for yet more disappointment – and frankly, outright trauma.

Amber’s “family issue” was her getting back together with childhood sweetheart and future husband. I was really disappointed, but I thoroughly understood when she told me.

Her getting back with him would be like Maddie and I finding each other and finally getting together. He was the Maddie in her story. I understood, and was happy for her – and there was no way I would ever be able to compete with that anyway.

As I said last time, they are still together all these years later and have two beautiful daughters together. She and I are still good friends, and talk on Facebook from time to time. Amber is special to me because out of all the women who have passed through my heart, she is the only one other than Maddie who has respected my feelings, and done the right thing by me.

I hold Amber in very high regard.

The next woman to grab my attention was April, who I first met online. We just vibed with each other from the very beginning, and she was overtly flirty and even mildly sexual when we talked. Before long we got to talking on the phone, and meeting up for coffee one lunch time.

Instant attraction.

I wouldn’t say I was ever in love with her, but she was one of the kindest people who had ever touched my heart. She sent me flowers at work for my birthday. She would leave cheeky voicemails on my work phone during the night so I had a nice surprise when I got to my desk in the morning.

We talked about spending more time together – although she was studying and working, and finding time was difficult. Even so, it was a wonderfully exciting time.

Then one day, nothing. No messages online, no voicemails, no emails.

Nothing.

I asked a mutual online friend where she was.

“Oh, she got married, didn’t she tell you?”

No, no she didn’t.

I had to let those feelings slide away. She did finally one day pop up to apologise, an apology I accepted but made sure she knew she had really hurt me. She accepted she had done the wrong thing.

At least she was honest with me, albeit far later than she should have been.

Next came the most traumatic relationship of my life. So traumatic that in real life I do not speak her name, and I won’t even give her a fake name in this story. She doesn’t deserve one.

I was just getting over the shock of Amber when this new woman came into my life at a party I had been invited to by a friend. She was a strong personality who knew how to manipulate people into her circle of influence. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was to be her next victim.

She was a con-artist who I would later discover had a criminal history of duping men into relationships, bleeding them dry, fucking with their heads to the point of mental breakdown, and then throwing them aside when they were broke and no longer any use to her.

We were even engaged, and mere weeks away from the wedding when I finally found the courage to break away from her. She had taken just about everything I owned, and milked my finances before I even knew what was going on. Completely blindsided.

She pushed me to breaking point through mental, emotional and physical abuse. She even tried to stab me with a six-inch kitchen knife, and though I managed to disarm her in the midst of her psychotic rage, there are still several small scars on my hands from where the blade caught me during the struggle.

I came in with everything, but left with nothing – except my life and a psychological hole that took me a very long time and a lot of help from a psychologist to climb out of.

My friends and family banded around me, but I had a long journey ahead. Ironically, one of my best supports through this was April.

I moved back in with my parents while I got back on my feet, and about a year later I moved into a small unit in a quiet little suburb, tucked away in the corner of a new development where nobody could find me.

Very few people had the address.

I was tired and broken, and I needed time to heal – a lot of time. I had lived and loved so much in my life and had nothing to show for it.

But what I needed more, more than anything, was Maddie.

She would know how to fix me.

Life without Maddie around was a cold place.

There was no doubt whatsoever that we would still care for each other, but after that fleeting moment on Boxing Day, she just seemed to disappear. I didn’t know where she was, and that was scary to me – I always took great comfort that I knew where I could find her.

She had moved out of her parents home, I presume to live with her fiancé and get married and be happy.

I was absolutely over the moon for her, but I no longer had any kind of chance to win her heart, and it was an empty feeling.

Still, much like the previous time our worlds disconnected, I tried to move on without her. It was what she would have wanted me to do.

The difference was that last time, I thought I loved her – but this time I was sure that I loved her.

My final year of university started, and something was different. I don’t know if my resignation that Maddie was now completely out of my reach forever changed the way I carried myself, and how people saw me.

The whole vibe was different, and women seemed to be noticing me. That was absolutely terrifying as someone who still basically had zero confidence in himself.

There was an amazing girl named Amber at university who had been flirting with me a little the year before, but this year she came on a lot stronger. Frankly, she was gorgeous and we were already good friends. However, I absolutely wasn’t ready, and despite how nice the flirting with her felt – and new for me – I didn’t try and push it any further.

Amber and I are still good friends to this very day. She’s married to her childhood sweetheart and has a couple of kids with him.

Then there was Sarah. Sarah was a disaster for me.

It had been about six months since the coffee meetup with Maddie, and I felt I had healed a lot, and Sarah and I really did hit it off. My low confidence probably affected how this one worked out, but it was this experience that killed off my confidence around women, pretty much for good.

It took a lot of energy for me to ask Sarah on a date, but somehow I managed. I was nervous as hell, and she had recently broken up with a long-term boyfriend, a guy who had been cheating on her and being emotionally and mentally abusive to her. Definitely good reasons to break up with someone.

She wanted to go slow, and that was fine by me – slow was what I really needed anyway.

The first date was a train wreck. I was so nervous that I could barely interact, and she was so timid after her breakup that there was a lot of silence going on. Not good.

A few days later I called her and suggested we give it another go – it had been so bad because we were both so not ready for it, that going on another we would at least know each other and feel a lot less awkward.

She agreed, and the second date was massively better. We both relaxed, and actually enjoyed ourselves, I thought we were ready for a third date as it was so happy and friendly. My usual lack of confidence was there, but I was dealing with it okay.

I called about a week later to ask her out for another date. I couldn’t believe how well I was doing, and I couldn’t believe I had gotten past two dates with someone. I was so proud of myself.

“Sarah, any ideas where you’d like to go on another date?” was my almost-confident question. I had gotten a slight vibe that she wasn’t into it as much as I was, but I was so happy to try.

“Andrew, thanks for the good times we’ve had, but I’m just not feeling this going much further. I’m really sorry.”

That stung, but given I had a vibe she might turn me down, I wasn’t completely shocked, and had even prepared myself for it.

I was okay – my confidence took a bit of a hit – but I was okay. Disappointed, but okay – though that’s the moment she chose to kick my legs out from underneath me.

“Andrew, if I’m being honest…” she started.

At this point I went on red alert. It had ended on a friendly note, and I thought it was amazing that although it wasn’t going to go any further, that it had ended nicely for a change. There was nothing more she needed to say.

Say plenty more she did.

“…if I’m being honest, if I had a choice between starting something with you, staying single, or going back to my abusive ex, I would choose him first, staying single second, and you third.”

Bang.

An abusive arsehole was a better option than me. Being with nobody was a better option than me. Those things were more interesting to her than me – and even if that was exactly how she felt, there was no need to say it.

It utterly destroyed me. What confidence I had built up? Gone in an instant.

I gave up. I wasn’t interested anymore. I couldn’t have cared if I stayed single for the rest of my life. Maddie wasn’t an option – and everyone else, with the possible exception of Amber, had kicked me in the guts.

I finished university and moved to the big smoke for work – a time I had planned to be joining Shannon in a much closer relationship, but obviously that had long since fizzled. Curiously, I discovered Amber had become single – the only time in her life that she wasn’t with her childhood sweetheart.

She would come and visit from time to time, and although we were never officially together, we were getting there – slowly – but getting there.

She was coming up to see me one Saturday so I could escort her while she did some shopping – but it was just an excuse to spend time together.

On the Thursday before, she called and asked for a rain check – she had to head home to deal with a family issue, but we’d try again for the following weekend.

I had a dream about Maddie that night – it was about sharing that Saturday with Maddie instead of Amber. Everything we had planned, but it was Maddie instead of her, now that Amber wasn’t coming.

At the end of the dream I turned to Maddie and said, “Goodbye Maddie”.

Yes.

I said goodbye to Maddie.

It was a hard time for me.

I was sad, and in many ways depressed that Maddie had now seemingly slipped away from me forever, given she was getting married. It just seemed that she was completely out of reach now.

At the same time I also felt a little bit free. I had obviously always loved her, and probably always would.

Yet something always got in the way of us – and usually it was me that got in the way.

I was never against moving on with someone other than Maddie – the smattering of attempted and failed relationships I had been through told me internally that I could do that, but the disasters that most of those became always brought me back to her in the end.

So as sad and depressed as I was initially, I did feel better that all of those questions I needed to ask Maddie had finally been answered, albeit indirectly.

Could we ever be together? No, she’s getting married.

Did she love me? Yes, but not in that way, at least not any longer.

Could I move on? Yes, but I couldn’t see the path right now, and I needed to clear my head anyway.

I needed time to heal, yet I felt there would always be a connection between Maddie and myself.

My family would spend every Boxing Day with my mother’s family – in another nearby city. So we would all pile into the car and head that way from about mid-morning every year.

There’s a long straight stretch of road on the highway between the two cities, about five kilometres long, with a gentle curve at each end.

We rounded the bend, and briefly afterwards another car appeared at the far end, just rounding the bend about five kilometres away. There were no other cars visible in either direction.

Immediately I thought that it was Maddie, which was plainly stupid. How could I know that?

She was still on my mind, our coffee date being only a couple of weeks before, so I was probably just pining and wishing.

As the two cars got closer together, I got a little more curious. As the other car got closer, the pieces started to fall in to place.

It was the right colour.

It was the right make and model.

The two cars passed, and it absolutely was Maddie.

I was floored – there was no way I could have known it was her, but somehow I did know.

I knew in that moment that there would always be a connection between us. I was so in tune with her that I just knew it was her.

What I didn’t know was that brief moment was the last time I would see her for nearly another eight years.

And just how much would happen before then.

As I expected, meeting Maddie at the café was a warm moment, and as always lovely to spend a little time together.

We ordered coffees and talked a little about how I was doing. About how she was doing – of course I was interested in how she was too. I always was.

It was nice to thank her face-to-face for everything she had done for me over the previous few months, and needed her to understand I was doing much better. It was very important to me that she knew how thankful and gracious I was.

Which was absolutely what I was – much better. Maddie’s love had worked wonders for me.

After a little small talk and some sips of coffee I started to try and lead the conversation in the direction of our chat in the library that day, and that I was feeling things again thanks to that support which she gave unequivocally.

I can’t remember my words, but it didn’t take her long to figure out where I was going with my words.

“Andrew,” she said.

There was a tone to the way she said my name that kind of deflated me. I was worried.

“Honey, you have to know how much I love you, I know how much you love me. You are an amazing friend to me, and you always will be. You need to know that I am with someone, and he has asked me to marry him.”

Though it was probably really only a few seconds, I felt like it took me ten minutes to respond. At least it felt like it took that long to open my mouth again.

“Oh, wow, that’s amazing,” I eventually came back with.

“I am so very happy for you!”

Which was completely and utterly true. I was over the moon that she was happy and that it looked like she had found the man for her.

I also tried to hide that fact that I was crushed inside, but I’m sure she saw through that – just like she always saw through me when I was trying to hide how I was feeling.

We talked a little about him, and how they met.

What I couldn’t understand was why she hadn’t mentioned him before – given we’d been talking regularly for months, and not even at her birthday party did it seem there was anyone in her life.

It is true that I never directly asked her – (and that I probably shouldn’t have assumed) – but I would have felt that she’d have said something.

Yet she hadn’t.

At the end of our meetup, I am sure she sensed what had just happened for me, and hugged me extra tight and gave me a kiss on each cheek.

I asked her many years later why she never mentioned it, and she said it was so hard for her not to tell me. That she knew it was going to hurt me either way, but that she just wanted to be there for me in the first instance and that she thought I would understand.

And I did understand, yet there was still a hint of “why?” in my heart. It was a lightning bolt from left field, but I loved her. It wouldn’t be much of a love if I got angry at her for doing what was right for her.

For me, that is what love means – letting the person you love be the person they need to be.

“We’ll keep in touch, okay?” she asked.

“Of course!” I said back with the happiest voice I could possibly muster – then we parted in opposite directions.

While I wasn’t a long way down the path with my feelings again, I was still devastated. I also know she would have been hurting like hell to have hurt me, especially given the situation she had spent the last several months helping me get through.

I started to wonder if she really knew how much I cared about her. She should have known how I felt after so long, but did she really know how I felt?

I wandered off in a daze. I didn’t have any where specific to be, and I just got on a public bus – any old one, I didn’t care where it was going.

Just get me away from here.

As it happened, a bit over a week later Maddie did call me again. Just as she promised.

That didn’t surprise me in the slightest – I didn’t for even a single moment believe that she would not call me when she said she would call me.

“In a week or so…” she said.

The important part of this for me wasn’t even that she called, but that she made a promise and had kept that promise. I was so used to being lied to, led on, even cheated on – that I was starting to think that there were no truly honest people in the world.

Maddie laid down the promise and kept it. She was always honest with me, and kicked me in the butt when I needed to be kicked in the butt.

We actually ended up chatting about once a week for a few months, almost to the end of the year. It felt so foreign to have someone not only do what they said they would, but also treat me with love, respect, and support.

Sometimes she would call me, sometimes I would call her. She was always interested in what I had to say, about how I was doing. She had said “I’ll always be here for you…”

And she was. My Maddie was the one rooting for me and pulling me through the quagmire that my head had been over the previous few months.

Honest and pure.

I don’t know that I was falling in love with her again, but the closeness, the affection and the support she was giving to me certainly started my head down that path.

I was convinced she was single.

I certainly was single, but almost certainly not ready to “go again” with anyone – but Maddie is different. By now she had come to represent so many things in my life that were matches for my own personal values – well, that I was probably risking my heart if I let the feeling roll too far.

I wasn’t sure it was time to ask the question, but with five years having passed since our conversation in the library at school, I was probably frustrated more than anything that we had never finished that talk off.

She never told me how she really felt.

I invited her for coffee a few days later at a little café in the main street of town, so we could sit out the front and chat face to face – not over the phone.

Maddie had done so much for me the previous few months that my heart was wavering for her again, but for so long neither of us had brought it up.

At a little street café one December morning we finally talked about it, and it would bring a moment that would prove to be just another crossroad in my life.

Maddie saved my life that night, in a lot of different ways.

The phone was still ringing after I dialled the last digit of her number when I realised that it was the first time I had ever called her number. Her birthday invitation was the first time she had ever called mine.

After so long it was weird that it was the first time either of those things had happened.

The phone rang for a little while, and then was finally answered, and it was Maddie’s voice on the line.

As soon as I heard it I burst into tears.

“Andrew?”, she asked.

I blubbered yes between sniffles and tears, and said I needed to talk to someone. Somehow I got out that I hadn’t even chosen to call her, but that it just happened instinctively.

“I’m here for you honey,” she said reassuringly.

That was all I needed to hear. I took a few moments to get my wits about me, and then we started to talk about what had happened that day.

To her credit, Maddie never criticised Shannon’s actions – she was just a voice of reason. She agreed with my own thoughts that I might have left things too long, but that it was not an excuse for chopping me down so brutally.

I think we talked for nearly two hours.

She’s always had a way of lifting the people around her, yet she is sometimes so critical of herself and how she is as a person. Perhaps I am biased, but that has never made any sense to me – she’s even said it to me quite recently that she can be really cruel to people sometimes.

Nope. I cannot accept that.

On this horrendous Monday night, she was my saviour. I didn’t ask anything of her except to let me talk to her about how I was feeling about Shannon and what had just happened.

She just sat on the other end of the phone and listened. To every last dribbling messy broken-hearted thought I had. She spoke when she needed to, and reassured me when I needed it.

On a night I could have plummeted to rock bottom and dropped into a dark place, not only did she stop that from happening, but I actually felt better by the time we hung up.

“I’ll call you in a week or so to see how you’re doing,” she said.

“In the meantime, go and do things for yourself. Buy yourself something nice. Get drunk.”

“You’ll be fine and I’ll be here when you need me,” were her final thoughts.

That night I finally really understood her. On some level, I knew she loved me.

Romantic love is great, but when someone really loves you, you can feel it in the simplest of moments. This was a complicated night, but “I’ll be here when you need me” was the simple thing I needed to hear.

That night, she was my hero.