It was a strange time – still reveling in the love and support from Maddie, yet still healing from the pain of Nadine.

Things between Nadine and I were still fine – as I’ve previously talked about, we didn’t hate each other, we had just run out of steam. We still had a wonderful son to somehow raise together, and we were making that work, even when he spent most of his time with me.

As per my last post – (and shall I be honest, also per pretty much my entire life) – Maddie was the person I was leaning on. She was there when I needed her, never more than a phone call away.

In many ways, it felt like the support she gave me when Shannon had ripped up my heart 20 years beforehand. The warmth and the kindness she showed reminded me very much of that time.

The difference this time around was that I knew Maddie was seeing someone, and quite seriously at that. As such, I was very conscious of not calling her too often and not sending her too many text messages.

The very last thing I wanted to do was to cause her any pain and anguish by being responsible in even a small way towards her relationship failing.

When we did talk, she was brilliant – as always.

There was no doubt in my mind after so very many years that Maddie loved me, and that perhaps at times that that love may even have been a romantic love.

This just wasn’t one of those times, and as I always found myself when she was with someone, I was so very happy for her.

There wasn’t a single specific thing she did for me or said to me during this time that was any more or less significantly helpful to me. She was loving and supportive, consistent and kind.

In the initial few months, I leant on her more than I did later on, but nothing ever changed. She of course knew about my mental health battles, and how important it was for me to be heard and encouraged. She never strayed from that understanding.

As I said, as her relationship grew stronger, I kept a comfortable distance to show her that I cared that she had found someone special again – (and I absolutely did!) – and be respectful of both Maddie and her man.

The trouble for me was that I started to desperately miss her. I shouldn’t have, as it wasn’t as if we were talking every single day. Far from it in fact.

Yet my heart was aching terribly. I missed her every day, and wanted to talk to her every day.

So many times over the years she had been there for me, and she was doing it again. We loved each other very much – but I couldn’t be with her.

It was agonising. It was constant. It was a physical pain.

I loved Maddie, and I couldn’t see anything else – but like the good best friend, I was determined not to interfere with her relationship. I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I did.

This process in my head went on for about two years – yes, two years.

It was like the old days – loving her from a distance, and not being able to do anything about it – but this time I was sure I was in love with her, when back then I probably only thought I was.

It was not good for my mental state. So many of the those same thought patterns I had when I was 12 and 13, trying to understand how I felt about her, were back and really affecting me in a deeply complex and emotional way.

I crashed.

I didn’t completely break down, but one morning I woke up so confused within myself, that I called in sick to work and went to see my doctor.

He took one look at me and asked me what the hell was going on. He told me he’d never known me like this before, and that he was concerned for me. I was rambling, incoherent, and not making sense to myself – so I wasn’t going to be making sense to him.

I told him as much as I was comfortable with explaining to him, and that I was able to explain. My blood pressure – (which is normally low) – was off the scale.

I was about a week and a half away from two weeks of annual leave from work, so he signed a medical certificate off to cover up until that day, therefore effectively giving me a month off work. I was upfront with my employer, and they were very supportive.

The doctor had sent me for a psych consult, and I was given some anti-depressants.

I was so happy that I had Maddie in my life as the beautiful friend she had almost always been, but I was desperately sad because I knew I was so in love with her by this stage, yet had no way to be with her.

The month away from work, someone to talk to, and that short course of medication lifted me off the floor.

The psychologist gave me some advice which appeared a bit negative on the surface, but turned out to be completely correct.

“…sometimes you have to bottom out completely before you can get better…”

I was completely bottomed out, and could completely feel it in almost every waking moment.

I felt so close to Maddie – closer than ever before. Yet, as usually seemed to happen, the timing was all wrong, and the distance between us could have been a thousand miles.

Oceans apart, day after day.

That song still held true.

Maddie still doesn’t know that I went through all of this, and I don’t know if I could ever tell her about it.

One day, I hope that I can.

I should probably have been a mess inside at this point, but I was actually doing okay.

I had never been great at being alone, despite most of my need to be with someone being related to how I’ve felt about Maddie over the years. By that I mean that, yes, I had always wanted to be with her, but I was always interested in being close to someone, even when there was not an opportunity to be closer to Maddie.

If I had to choose, I would choose her every time, but I’ve never really had the chance to choose her. We were always either struggling with our friendship in the early days, in different parts of the world in later years, or in different stages in our lives.

I never felt as if there wasn’t a possibility for us, just that there was rarely the opportunity. Circumstances rarely brought us together at the right time.

The break up with Nadine was difficult, but by the time I had written the Facebook post I described in my last post, I had reset my head.

This was the time I figured out that I really didn’t need to be with someone to be happy. Being with someone would still have been amazing, but the overwhelming need I had always felt just wasn’t with me any longer.

Maddie was an amazing support through this period. It wasn’t that there was any doubt that she would be – and indeed, she always had been, but she was a massive part of me finding the inner peace I had found by this time.

I was focused on myself, and on my son.

That was all that mattered – yet Maddie was always there to listen. Despite being largely at peace and happy in life, there were definitely still days and nights – especially the nights – where sitting alone was hard work.

All it took was a phone call to Maddie – (who by this time was a bit over relationships too) – to hear her friendly voice, and sometimes just have a long silly chat about nothing at all to help me feel not alone.

We were like this for about two and a half years. The person each other would call when life was feeling a bit dark – the closest we had ever been, yet still not the closest we would ever be.

That would come some years later still.

Maddie allowed me to find a calmness and clearness that I had probably never felt before.

Was I about to fall in love with her again?

Yes, I was about to – but it would take me back to a mental space I had not been in since I first met her so many years earlier.

I loved her, but didn’t have the courage to tell her.

Again.

Despite my love for Nadine, and the connection we were sharing through our son, the love was never as strong as it needed to be.

It became apparent over time that it wasn’t going to last forever, and it was becoming clear that the relationship meant more to me than it did to Nadine.

That said, we did make it to almost eight-and-a-half years, the longest relationship I have had in my entire life – with every previous one measurable only in weeks or months.

There was no hate, nor any anger. We barely argued the entire time we were together, although there were frayed emotions when she decided to tell me it was time to move on from me.

I had felt it coming for some time, and in many respects we both tried really hard to keep a family together for our son – however because the relationship started in such a low-key way, just finding ourselves together one day, a lot of the things that form the basis of a strong and ongoing relationship just weren’t there.

The biggest problem I faced was that I didn’t know how to be in a relationship that was coming to an end.

Yes, I had been through the trauma of the time with the psychopath who tried to kill me, but in the end that was easy to walk away from. I wasn’t keen on being dead for her.

So a “normal” relationship coming to an end? I had zero experience of that, and it is fair to say that I didn’t cope very well.

I remember one Sunday afternoon when our son had spent the weekend with my parents, and tempers and emotions were high as I was getting ready to leave the house to collect him. I think it was the only time in the whole “death period” that voices had been raised.

I believe that was the moment we both understood that things had run their course. I cried and cried and cried the whole time I was driving the 40 minutes to pick him up, stopping only a few minutes before getting there to pull myself together.

We moved into separate rooms, and that crushed me. It felt like things were over, but I still wanted to try to sort things out until the last dying gasp of the relationship.

What hurt the most was that Nadine seemingly had no interest in trying at all.

To be clear – I blame neither myself nor Nadine for the relationship dying on the vine. Neither of us did anything “wrong” – (and we’ve always been friends despite it all) – and we’ll always be connected given we have a son together.

It just………..stopped working.

I didn’t move out straight away – I wanted to make sure I found the right place for me and our son, because it became clear pretty quickly that he was more interested in living with me, than with Nadine.

He still lives with me to this day, more than a decade later. We all still get along well, just that Nadine and I don’t work on an intimate level any longer.

When we did finally move, the only people who knew were our direct families. Mine and Nadine’s.

I didn’t even tell Maddie. We weren’t in as regular contact as we might otherwise have been, as I chose to respect the relationship Nadine and I were in – but we were casually in touch, mainly on Facebook.

I didn’t tell anyone for a good four or five months.

Despite things ending amicably, and living effectively as a single dad with my wonderful kiddo, I was torn apart inside. I cried myself to sleep most nights. Most days I simply just existed.

Out of bed, kiddo to school, off to work, collect kiddo from Nadine’s, and then home. That was my new normal, and I was so unfocused that I couldn’t break that cycle. I did nothing for myself. I hid myself away.

I didn’t talk about anything to anyone. I was in a trance, and I was not coping.

I hated being alone again.

Then one night, we were playing Wii Sports together in the lounge room, and something clicked in my head.

It was time to talk.

As soon as kiddo was in bed, I sat down at the computer and typed out a long Facebook post, restricted to just my most important friends.

Explaining where I was, what had happened – where I was inside my head and inside myself. I apologised for “going missing”. I bawled my eyes out the whole time. I had been holding it all in and now it was coming out.

Eventually I clicked “save”.

Before long, I got a bunch of “shocked emojis” and comments on how people were offering to be there whenever I needed an ear or a shoulder. No disrespect to any of those comments at all, but they kind of felt like “that’s what they are supposed to say”. It was appreciated though, of course.

Maddie of course was the comment I was looking for the most, and despite her being about the tenth person to respond, she was the first to not come up with the plain old “I’m here when you need someone” guff.

She proclaimed that she was proud of me, and that I was inspiring for tackling the whole thing head on and doing what was needed for me and kiddo.

That’s what I needed to hear, and that was the point I started coming back to life.

As an autistic man, I have always struggled to form relationships, and stay in them for any length of time when they do start.

That said, a couple of years later I would find myself in a relationship with a woman named Nadine. We had actually known each other for nearly five years, and we were good friends – but there wasn’t ever any hint of romance between us.

And we just “found” ourselves in a relationship one day. We never really dated, or talked about spending time together – we just found ourselves together, and before long it was becoming intimate – and sexually intimate at that.

This was both amazing and terrifying to me. I truly appreciated her and came to love her – although it perhaps wasn’t the strongest relationship you might find. It was perhaps more an extension of the friendship we’d had for years, and it was perhaps a time where we both needed someone.

Don’t get me wrong – I loved Nadine and was fully committed to being with her, but it wasn’t a “normal” relationship in the sense that hadn’t been romantic sparks flying left, right, and centre between us.

As I said, we just found ourselves together.

In those early times, it felt almost convenient to both of us – we needed each other, we really liked each other, and here we were.

The day we discovered Nadine was pregnant was utterly mind blowing. It wasn’t planned, but it was absolutely welcome. We both wanted very much to be parents, but I don’t think either of us were expecting that this would be the relationship from which that would come.

Nadine called me at work one day, and insisted that I needed to come home and take her to the doctor – I wasn’t sure why she couldn’t go by herself. She didn’t say the words, but somehow she managed to convey the understanding that it was “for something that I should be there for.”

She had actually been to the doctor first thing that same morning and had a pregnancy test. The return visit in the afternoon was to get the results. We had been living together for some months, and were seeing the same doctor who we both liked very much. He was kind enough to rush the test through, which is why we knew the same day.

She was indeed pregnant, and about six weeks along.

We told our families straight away of course, but you’re not “supposed” to tell anyone else until you’re in the second trimester, in case there are problems in that time – the riskiest time for a pregnancy. However, I told Maddie almost straight away too.

I didn’t want to not share it with her. It felt a little odd to be telling an old flame about it and I didn’t tell Nadine that I had. She did know about Maddie – she had come up in conversations throughout our long friendship – but I wasn’t sure Nadine would appreciate it being talked about to outsiders so early in the pregnancy.

For some reason though, I felt that Maddie needed to know about my pending fatherhood.

She was rapt for me, and rapt that I had gotten so far into a relationship that this was happening. She knew Nadine and I were together, but knowing that I was going to be a father made Maddie really happy.

We had talked in the past how I wanted to be one so much, so she completely appreciated my excitement, even if it were a little uncool that I would be sharing it with her on the first day.

That’s the thing about my autism – you either completely bottle up and don’t talk about things at all, or you completely overshare every thought and emotion with people who most likely don’t need to hear about them.

They are the polar extremes that happen inside of you. You don’t mean it, and you almost immediately regret some of the things you do and say. You still feel like they were the right things to do and say, but you doubt yourself and feel horrible straight away too.

I had always dreamed that this day would involve Maddie – that it would be a moment of joy between us about becoming parents together. It wasn’t between us, but my brain kept me within that dream, and it had to include Maddie.

Maddie was never an issue between Nadine and myself, but that was the only time I ever felt that I had been even just a little dishonest with her.

For the rest of the time, I was proud and over the moon to be with Nadine – and soon we would be sharing the joys of parenthood.

I could hardly wait.

Yet, I did stop and think of all of the stupid things I had done dealing with my love for Maddie during high school, and realised why it wasn’t her I was sharing this experience with.

My coffee date with Maddie became such a beautiful memory in my life – one of my favourites.

Not because I got to see her again after so many years, although that of course was a most wonderful part of that experience.

It is one of my favourites because that moment of reconnection signified the moment after which we never lost touch with each other ever again.

Even as I write this, it is more than 20 years ago that we shared a simple hour together, finding in each other the friendship we almost always had. There was no particularly reason why we ever disconnected in the first place – life just took us in different directions, and to different parts of the world.

It took only moments for everything to flood back – the mood was very much like it was at her 21st birthday party. Warm and friendly. Loving and close.

I think we both knew that even though there wasn’t any vibe or inclination towards any romantic relationship on this particular day, that now we were reconnected, we would always be a part of whatever life each of us would experience from now on.

We really have shared many special moments in our lives.

Several years later on the night that my son would be born – (that part of my story is coming soon) – Maddie would be one of the first people I told. My son was born quite close to midnight, and I sent a text message to each member of my family, and a text message to Maddie.

Yet Maddie was the first to respond.

She was over the moon for me. She knew that I had always wanted to be a father, and was just so pleased.

I was rather chuffed too, I must say.

That simple coffee date we shared cemented our friendship forever. Yet, while I would move on and soon start a family of my own, Maddie was never far from my heart.

It certainly was not the end of our story.

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?”

(UPDATED: I spoke to Maddie over Christmas – as we usually do – and I asked her about this again. Seems I mis-remembered the story a little bit. I had it in my mind they were only three or four blocks north of Ground Zero, but she said it was at least 10 or 11 blocks, so while they were scared and absolutely ran as fast as they could, they were in less danger than it might have seemed above – but the point of the story, that I thought of her that night – is absolutely still there!)

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.