MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE had to be told in third person to be effective.

There isn't an hour of my life without you in it. I mend the boats, test them and all the while the memories come in like the tide.

I was thinking today of when we were young, and you left our world for a bigger world. I was a lot more scarred then I would admit. I fought my fear by telling myself you'd come back someday, and trying to think of the first thing I'd say to you when I saw you again. I must have tried out a hundred possibilities. What did I finally say? Not much, my mouth wouldn't work except to kiss you, and when you said I'm here to stay that said it all. Well, I'm doing it again. I keep imagining what I'd say to you if somehow you came back.

I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again.

As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn't exist.

If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and in many ways that was worse than finding out in the first place. Because if you were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and wondering what might have been.

I know the Lord has a plan for us all, but sometimes, I just don't understand what the message can be.