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Once in everyone's lifetime a critical moment is reached with a significance that has a life-impacting effect. For some, it is a bush with death that brings about this feeling; for others, it is the realization of something previously unknown; for me, it was the moment I asked out the girl of my dreams.

For over six years Ann and I worked in separate departments of the same hotel, yet we always seemed to share lunch or dinner together in the hotel's employee cafeteria. During these meal breaks, we shared intimacies with each other few other people had ever shared with either of us. Many times, these breaks went over their allotted times because we were too deep into the conversation of that time. Whenever I left her, I went back to my job wishing I could have spent just one more moment, even one instant, with her before having to part from her company.

Over those six years, I agonized over the realization that I could never garner up the courage that was required for me to ask her out. Over the years I made simple, yet believable, excuses that served to convince myself that the timing had in fact been wrong each time I let an opportune moment pass me by. Sometimes I told myself that she wasn't really interested in me; other times I told myself that there had to be someone else involved with her because she was way too beautiful to be going home alone each and every night; and then there were times when I convinced myself that she was worth waiting for just the right moment.

But that moment never came. We continued to have long, interesting conversations where I found myself fascinated by anything she had to say, even if she was reading to me from the phone book. For those six, long years, I never made a move or said the words that reflected how I truly felt.

It was at the end of this waiting period, at this nexus of false hopes, that I realized why I could never truly ask her out. I was so scared of being turned down by her, of discovering she truly didn't want to become involved with me. I was living in this make-believe world where my fantasy woman was waiting for me to say the words that would bring us together forever. Calling her on my fantasy just might show me how little I really meant to her. Then I would not only lose our intimate conversations, but my fantasy would die right along with them. I would be left with nothing but a shattered, six-year dream.

However, after six years, I told myself I could wait no longer. I was only fooling myself with this illusion,

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