An Introduction:  My friend Michael was like the other half of me. We were in just about every way true soul mates. Except, of course, that he was gay.

When we first met, that caused us a lot of angst and put huge strains on our friendship. Michael had been sure of his sexuality for years (he'd actually left home at 15 to live with an older man, but that's another story entirely), and I knew he was gay. But we were instantly and mutually drawn to each other. And that was confusing. We were only 19 and what we seemed to be feeling was just like all the romance books said falling in love was like - that feeling of meeting someone with whom you share a deep bond, so deep, and so instant, that it was as if we were very old friends who'd been parted for a while and had a lot to catch up on.

Society, all the films and books and stories, hadn't prepared us. They were all about romance - there wasn't anything much about other kinds of love, other ways of relating. It made Michael question his sexuality, and I ... I went through a small personal hell till we got our heads around the fact that life didn't have to be like the books and the movies all told us it should. We realized that we could make our own rules and live our lives the way that worked for us. We both moved on and into a relationship that was one of the most important in my life. In his, too, he told me before he died.

Like many others, he died way too young of the plague that has robbed us of so many long before their time.

Curiously, although perhaps symbolic of the karmic link between us, Michael shared his birthday (July 15th) with my mother. And he died on the anniversary of my father's death (July 30th).

So in July 2003, as a sort of memorial to Michael (who never got to see QAF and who would have loved it so much), I put out my first fanfic story.

Now, once again as a memorial to Michael, ...just as I put it out back then - warts and all (including a couple of Aussie expressions that I would know better than to use now) ...