It began late one night, almost exactly five years ago while I was working at home waiting for some files to download. A week prior, a friend had given me the web address of a website he insisted that I visit. I was a bit of a workaholic during those days and all of my time spent online was for work purposes. This particular night I decided to break from that norm and visit this curious website that I had been given. As it turns out it was a web-dating website in which all users had to have a webcam. I had a webcam and I had time to kill. The very first person to send me a message via webcam chat was someone named blndblu28. He had blonde hair, blue eyes and was more handsome than anyone I had ever spoken to, online or off. And so it began. He introduced himself and I did the same. We chatted via webcam for hours that night. My work, well, those files may still be downloading for all I know. Every night following was consumed with us getting to know each other.
Eventually we graduated from instant messages and e-mails to telephone calls and webcams simultaneously. We would spend hours talking about his family, my family, work, hopes, and places we had been to or lived previously. We discussed what we wanted for the future and asked thousands of questions geared to helping us learn more about the other person. They were the most exciting conversations I’d had in a long time and I looked forward to them everyday with giddy anticipation. I found him to be sweet, loyal, sensitive, decisive, very handsome, and sincere.
Very quickly, I became more interested in him than I would have normally deemed acceptable were it anyone else in the same situation. I knew in my heart what I was beginning to feel, but always being the practical, responsible individual, I reasoned that those feelings were surfacing much too soon. Days, then weeks passed and not a day would go by that we didn’t speak multiple times a day. He was the first one I spoke to every morning and the last one I spoke to before I fell off to sleep. We had been discussing finally meeting in person and it came out, those three delicious words that I could not wait to hear him say to me. He told me that he loved me.
And for a split second, I believe I stopped breathing, went deaf, and all my extremities went numb. Then warmth enveloped me, my heart started beating faster. I was flush and I felt a happiness that I had never felt before. My feelings weren’t surfacing too soon. It wasn’t crazy to fall for someone that I haven’t even met in person. What I felt inside was finally justified because the truth of the matter was that I loved him too.
From that point on things between us seemed to progress pretty quickly. “I want to come to visit you,” were his exact words. Immediately I had a small panic attack. I became nervous, the kind of nervous that makes you nauseous, makes it hard to breathe, and makes you want to just run away. Oddly, I was thrilled and terrified at the same time. “What if he doesn’t like me?” “What if he thinks I am ugly or fat?” Those were the questions going through my mind at that very moment and they didn’t leave my mind until after he arrived. We decided that he would come to visit on November 22, 2004. I will never forget that date. We planned that he would stay for four days. I must have changed my mind about the perfect outfit to wear a hundred times. I finally decided on simplicity. I wore a crisp, white cotton button-down shirt with blue jeans. I was going for a casual-chic look. I didn’t want to appear too eager, yet I wanted him to know that this was special to me. Interestingly he was also wearing a white button-down shirt and blue jeans. For a split second, that fact made me smile. I had never been so scared in my life. That is the honest truth. It was so silly to me to feel that way because he was merely a man. That fact didn’t matter. I suppose my hopes and expectations were getting the best of me.
