I could write a million words or more about Maddie.

It would probably take at least that many words to process my way through my feelings for her, and even then I would probably have left a lot out.

It’s complicated. Very complicated.

It would be easy enough to just say “I love her”, and leave it at that, but it’s just not that simple. Absolutely, I love her – but the shape of that love is varied, and colourful, and in many ways impossible to put into words.

But I’m going to try – and try and avoid a million words!

Maddie is a country girl, who moved to nearby my home town some months before we met. I don’t actually know if she and her family moved to support their choice of school for her, or whether their choice of school was based on the move.

Regardless, her parents and my parents chose the same school.

I only remember meeting her on the first day of Year 7 – and instantly I noticed her. I may have “subconsciously” met her a few months earlier at what our school called “placement tests” – deciding roughly which students went into which class groups together – and maybe whatever faint memory I had of her from those tests stuck with me – but I don’t remember noticing her that day.

All I know is that the day before the start of high school, girls were “icky”. That silly boy thing, where we think girls are just “girl germs”. I had no idea what would happen that next day. I was changed for the rest of my life.

On that following day, I remember seeing her and being mesmerised. I was 11 years old, and absolutely had no idea what I was feeling, but certainly girls no longer had germs!

She was beautiful, that was the word I chose right from the start. She really was, at least to me.

I do know that for at least the first month or two, I described my feelings for her to myself as a “crush” – that was the only word that made sense to me, and the word I used to write about her with too.

That word changed to “love” pretty quickly. I loved her. The words my inner voice used were “I love Maddie.”

Was it really love? I doubt it, but it was how I felt that I felt at the time – so the words and the feelings were valid.

I certainly didn’t tell anyone how I felt about her.

As a shy and introverted kid who came from a primary school situation of being constantly bullied, putting my feelings out wasn’t something that I was used to doing, and though in no way was I embarrassed about my feelings for her, I was scared of people knowing and reacting badly.

So many years later, that sounds silly – but that’s how my head functioned at that time. I was so completely used to holding things inside for my own protection, that it became almost a default behaviour to hide how I felt.

Despite keeping the feelings to myself, those first few months were a beautiful time. I could come to school every day and not be bullied, and I could come to school every day and see Maddie. I’m even smiling as I type these words, almost 40 years later.

I remember sitting in a class early one morning – a cold morning, light rain having just stopped, water dripping off the trees outside, but with sunlight shining through too. It was a beautiful visual.

It was a small class of only about 10 people, and Maddie was sitting directly across the table from me.

We were just staring into each other’s eyes and smiling. I can close my eyes right now and still see that image perfectly. Just this magical little moment between us. It probably meant something, but at the time I completely missed any message she was trying to send to me.

Picking up messages has always been difficult to me. Many years later when my first and only child was diagnosed with ASD, and the pediatrician was explaining that diagnosis, I recognised that the very symptoms and behaviours that were being described about my own child were exactly “me” back when I met Maddie.

Missing signals, not being empathetic to the non-verbal signals that people are giving off. Scared of expressing feelings openly, which would then sometimes explode out through frustration later.

I even missed the signal they day she said “I love you” to me, and spent the next few weeks putting out signals and messages which to most other people would have been obvious.

I saw them. I felt them. I loved the way they made me feel.

Yet, though it probably seems strange, I didn’t understand the messages. I was almost outside of my body, looking in – like watching a romantic movie. A romantic movie that I had no context available to me which could have, or even would have made me understand the story.

She probably gave up suspecting that I wasn’t interested.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Over the six years of high school, our relationship changed a lot. At times were we good friends, and at other times we were anything but. There were times I tried to express my feelings, and made horrible messes of it. She even expressly said to me one day “I hate you”.

A big change from “I love you” – but I actually deserved it at the time. I had not respected her anywhere near as much as I should have, particularly with respect to my feelings, which I am now sure she knew that I had.

It was a difficult time, and an awkward time – but eventually we worked it out and became friends again. Different, but friends again.

In the years since high school, we have spent long periods of time out of touch. We have spent time living near to each other, and very far apart from each other – but time and time again the friendship has shown to endure.

I’ve lived and loved and had other relationships. Some good, some bad. One good enough to have a child within, even though my son and his mother and I are no longer together. We are also still good friends – the friendship never died between us, just the romance.

The thing is, every time I found myself single over the years, Maddie would return to my heart. She has an – (almost!) – annoying habit of popping up in my life when I need her.

But despite the love and affection, in almost 40 years we’ve never found ourself “together”. There’s a lot of love, even today.

We have never really spoken about it either – but whenever she’s been single, I haven’t been. Whenever I’ve been single, she hasn’t been.

If we’ve both been single, neither of us were in any emotional state to be in a relationship with anyone, let alone each other.

In many many ways, I should have moved on a long time ago – but I’ve never gotten her out of my system – and despite how much I love her, sometimes that love truly hurts.

Time and time again she shows me just what an amazing friend and support she can be. Maybe that goes way back to the first year of high school when she did say “I love you” – and she never got me out of her system either.

Maybe.

(note: Richard Marx is going to pop up a lot in the music I relate to Maddie – he’s been something of a “spirit animal” to me over the years – his lyrics often speak very personally to me.)

To start things off, I should talk about who I am and why I have chosen to start writing about the world of emotion that I live inside.

I am a pretty normal, nothing special, 50-something single father. I have always struggled with my mental health, and struggled in relationships.

I grew up in a large regional city in Australia, the youngest of three children – an only son.

I have been let down and had my heart broken in some seriously horrific ways – at least they seem that way to me. I am not bitter about those times and those situations, as sometimes relationships and personal interactions just don’t work out they way we plan or hope.

Different people deal with situations they want to get out of in their own ways, and sometimes those actions seems cold and mean particularly to the people they are inflicted upon. As hurt as I have been, I’ve come to understand that most people don’t intend to cause that kind of pain on others.

They just take the easiest way through their own pain, and think of themselves first – and that’s perfectly okay. We should look after ourselves when dealing with pain – too many people do not.

I hold no malice at all – while some men take rejection so terribly personally, I’d like to think that I am different in that respect. Someone who doesn’t want to be with you is probably not someone you should want to be with anyway.

They are not flawed or any kind of horrible person if they have chosen to move on from you.

Many of the women who have passed through my life in a romantic sense are still very good friends in my life. That can be both a good thing and bad thing, particularly when I am feeling at my loneliest – as it is easy to reach out to and lean on them and open up feelings that shouldn’t be reopened.

I am a lonely person.

I have never been a particularly social person – keeping only a core group of really important friends that I know I can rely upon.

I am an over thinker, and a deep internaliser. I am typically quite introverted and struggle to make friends – which is why that core group of friends I do have are so important to me.

I have a very best friend I went to university with – he and I have now known each other for more than 30 years. We see each other as brothers, and we call each other when we’re struggling. He too has his mental health demons. We don’t get to catch up all that often, but when we do it’s like we saw each other last week. Time between catch ups doesn’t count – the bond makes up for that every single time.

As I said earlier, I seem to have this habit of remaining friends with women who have been romantic interests in my life – but out of all of those, my very best female friend goes back nearly 40 years.

Maddie. My beautiful Maddie.

Despite never actually having been in a romantic relationship with each other, I consider Maddie to be my first love. For a long time after I first knew her, she was the only girl I held in my heart. Nobody came close to her in my heart. Nobody could. I wouldn’t let anyone else try.

It started in high school when I was still 11-years old, and she was already 12-years old – the older woman, so to speak!

I will talk more about who she is in the next post.

I am successful in my career, and live quite comfortably and well within my means. I consider myself very fortunate to have had the life I have, and despite the bumps along the way, have for the most part enjoyed the journey.

When I speak about my mental health, I’ve never been suicidal or into self-harm when I have been at my lowest ebbs. My struggle – despite all that I have written above – is with my self-worth, my confidence within myself, and how I envisage other people see me.

Outwardly, I show little care for what other people think of me. The people I need in my life understand and respect me – but if someone doesn’t like who I am, I just don’t lose any sleep over it. I don’t need them in my life.

Inwardly however, I am shy and very self-conscious. When I find people I care about who haven’t yet figured me out, I often make a complete fool of myself trying to show my worth to them. I try too hard, and I am sure that has pushed many people away from me over the years.

That hurts the most when I am trying to attract the attention of women I find attractive and interesting – and often I suspect I end up looking like a dick.

It has only ever been that those who have stopped and taken a moment to look at me beyond that outer shell, who I have managed to connect with and managed to form relationships with – whether those be romantic relationships or just really amazing friends.

The good part is that because of this my core group of friends really are amazing friends.

The downside is that too many people I have cared about – even on the most basic of levels – either just don’t notice me, or write me off as some kind of goof because I’m trying too hard and make a complete mess of it.

As such I have spent a lot of my life as a single man.

I’ve found that that is not usually a problem – I know I don’t need another person to feel happy. Even with my mental struggles, I am generally a pretty happy person. It just sucks on the difficult nights when I just need to climb into bed and lay up against someone.

Against someone who wants to be there. Be there for me.

Which brings me to why I’ve decided to write my story into this website.

I don’t know if it is going to help me, but there have been a few recent events in my life that have bottled up inside of me a lot of feelings that have manifested over many many years.

Many of them are related to Maddie.

The thing about me and Maddie is that although I have loved and cared for her in so many different ways over so many years, not a lot of people know about my feelings for her.

She knows that I have them, and she respects that I have them. That wasn’t always so, and I’m sure that story will be told here too.

My family know about her, and although I expressed a little of how I felt about her to them in the early years, I certainly never “coloured in” the story of exactly what she meant then, what she means now, and all the different feelings I have had for her in between.

I wish I had talked of her more.

I am sad at the moment – and these are feelings I need to express outwardly. Many of them concern Maddie. Plenty of them don’t. Lots of them are a mixed bag.

There is music – so much music. You don’t care about someone for almost 40 years, and not have a playlist of songs you hold in your heart for them. It’s a very long playlist on my phone! Those songs will help me tell this story.

I fear a little that this website will become something of a shrine towards Maddie, but that’s not the intent. However, I have kept so much inside for all of this time, that those feelings finally need oxygen.

I can feel myself slipping down, and I need to use my love for her to rise up again.

She’s always been able to do that for me.

I have absolutely no idea how long this is going to take.

Today is Monday, 26 August 2024 – and on the way home from work tonight I decided that I needed to start writing this story, a story of my heart.

I am a very private person. While I’m quite open and even ebullient in everyday life, my personal life is a very hidden part of me.

Hiding it has held me back emotionally in many ways, and I really want to see if belting everything out where it can be seen will help me. I think that it will.

I saw a wonderful psychologist many years ago who identified that I was an internaliser, and that I needed to be more open and honest with myself. She was right, and while I was able to do that for many things in my life, the most personal part of me – my heart – was always locked away.

It’s time. Time to talk about the woman who has been a part of me for nearly 40 years.

I’m not looking for internet fame or celebrity, I don’t want to go viral. I don’t even care how many people do and don’t read this site. I’m not trying to win her over.

It is for me.

Though not our real names, I will call myself Andrew, and I will call her Maddie.

I hope to sit down at least once a week and add a chapter to this story – and see how far it gets. Just maybe, I will never finish it.