Once when I was a little boy, my mother told me, "John, you can do anything you want to do, so long as you're willing to work hard for it.

" I believed my mother. In the years that followed I worked hard and I had some amount of success. I never got rich because that's not what I wanted. I didn't get famous, for it was not fame I sought. Instead I wanted love, and I worked hard at achieving it in every way. I was a good lover. I gave my lovers everything I could. I treated them the very best. But my lovers were seldom truthful with me.

Instead they would take my love and give me love, it seemed, only partly, always holding something back. Then I decided that the way to get love that I needed was not face to face with a lover, but through my computer. I chatted with and emailed a woman who was a prison guard, I lavished gifts on her almost anonymously, and would have done more had I known what to do. We were to meet for the first time, until I made a fatal mistake. I hinted to her that she should have a beautiful nightgown I saw in a catalog. Why, I don't know, but the hint of sex angered her and she was crude as she divorced herself from our online relationship. Then, a long time later, I met Suzanna on a website exchange and sent an email. I didn't pursue her at first.

But she did pursue me. I liked that for a change. It was a way that women had shown me the glimmerings of love for me that they were capable of having. I wrote her back. The rest is history, as they say.

Unfortunately, it is just that, history.

Let me explain. Suzanna was a very sensuous and very beautiful woman some six years younger than me. She'd had a brief, if illustrious, career in porn films. For all that, she was a sensitive yet outspoken sensualist in the sexy stories she shared with me. I gave her the best of pent up fervor which boiled in my loins as I wrote her the erotic stories trapped by my past and released by my mind. She was appreciative and always reciprocated soon with her own passionate visions that I awaited each time I opened my email.

It was not these erotic stories alone that kept our passions for each other alive over the Internet. I sent original poetry, some written for her, and special pictures to illustrate my stories.

She sent me beautiful scenes and cards with lover's poems. We shared simple greetings of good morning or good night and our news. She sent her own photos, her modeling pictures and videos of herself making love with actors in the most provocative ways. It stirred my imaginings about her more than even her stories.

And I was becoming desirous of meeting my online love partner. I had worked to keep our relationship one of distance, now I wished to find out how I could work to make it real.

I think she too felt this tug between us, that could bring us together in the flesh. Maybe she worried that it wouldn't be the same, or as good, or even a good thing if we met.

All I know is that suddenly she disappeared. She was no longer at the end of her email address. And I could not trace her by only a first name, which is all either of us had. I tried but failed. I could not get what I wanted, could not get back the love growing between us, no matter how hard I worked to find a way. Now, Suzanna is only a lush memory and a sad reminder in the emails I keep on file and the pictures and videos that I'd downloaded. But she will be someone who I'll ever hope to find again on a profile and at the end of an email online.