based on a true story

We first encountered each other on a videogame forum in the summer of 1992. I was about to enter university. She was a precocious high school freshman. This was a forum on Prodigy, before either of us had discovered the Internet, and we had taken to swapping juvenile fanfic that turned into private messages about what books we were ripping off for inspiration. Somehow, that led to us exchanging snail mail addresses, and then writing each other letters. I could still remember sitting in the university cafeteria, eating my lunch, and unfolding a new letter from her, filled with stories of teenage flirtation, feedback on drafts that I had sent her, and all sorts of interesting observations that can come to a Southern girl in Connecticut. Those letters were tucked away in envelopes and saved in small boxes that have moved from dorm room to dorm room and apartment to apartment.

I remember one summer, before driving down to New York, I wrote to her and arranged to meet at a Starbucks near her house. It was the first time that we ever met in person and we were perhaps a bit nervous, but I don't remember much beyond the fact that I was so pleased to actually meet her; to know that she was just as verbal, smart and keenly perceptive in person as she was in her letters. We kept writing and kept apologizing for the gap in time between each letter, like the act of writing letters by hand was itself not exceptional.


( 20 years of updating each other on our lives )