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attributed to a 'distant auntie' - a fictitious friend of my mother's in order to avoid any conflict at home.

Though a musician in his own right, he is best known for his music, performed by others, and I promise, you know much of it by heart. By agreement, I never attended even one concert, not to this day. He said to know I was there would wilt him on stage and we would often joke about it.

How to condense this man into something so tiny as a few words on a page? I'm in love with him, it's true, and he with me. But as we were both married shortly after meeting and determined not to break those vows, we remained platonic - until...

Until one snowing evening in January of 1989. He was passing through my state and made a hushed call to my house "Can you get out for awhile?"

Somehow, all promises went out the window that night as I made an excuse not to come home and we met at his hotel. Hiding from his band, his promoter and of course, his wife, we took another room and fell into each others arms, frantic and urgent and half undressed when all turned to tears as he stopped us just short of the worst mistake we could have possibly made. But no matter how I wept, he stood strong and would only hold me that night and I clung to him somehow knowing it would never happen like this again. But I do so admire him for staying true, not to his marriage or mine so much, but to himself, to what he believed was right for us both.

He slipped from the bed sometime during the night, a note on my pillow, the words to a song, then unwritten, penned as he watched me sleep. Yes, you would know it and I cannot listen to it even today. Performed with great talent by another artist, it is his goodbye to me.

But it was only his goodbye as my lover, the lover he refused to become. He remains my friend to this moment and we spoke just now, my heart beating wildly as it has every time I hear that velvet voice speak my name. Our contact waxes and wanes, depending upon what is going on in our lives at the time, but it has never fallen off completely. He is now 60 and at 49 I have "been with" him now half of my life.

A few years after the night that wasn't, I sobbed when his beautiful daughter was born, happy for him, sad for me that I couldn't be the path she took on her way to his heart. It was then that I learned the painful lesson that we cannot be with everyone we might love, but we shouldn't abandon love because of it - and we haven't. Our dream of each other lives in the shadows and one

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