This is something I started writing about a year ago. It's intensely personal, and I'm not entirely sure why I choose to finish and post it now. It's a chronicle of what is perhaps the single most important event in my life.

All of the sub-headers I've used in this retelling are titles of XTC songs.

THE MEETING PLACE

It's a warm spring night in Birmingham, Alabama. I should be outside, lying on the soft grass, looking up at the stars. Instead, I'm sitting in a stuffy, cluttered little office, typing my screen name and password into my computer so I can log onto AOL. I'm bored, I'm restless, I'm lonely. I'm depressed.

Once I navigate through the pop-up advertisements AOL throws at me almost daily--and slog through a couple of digital reams of junk mail--I pull up my shareware IRC chat program (which I have yet to register, shame on me) and connect to an EFnet server. I'm one of the gazillions of schmucks out there looking for love in cyberspace. If I think about it too hard, it becomes rather silly and pathetic, like "Why the hell are you here when you should be out meeting people in real life?" So I don't think about it. I just cruise.

I join a couple of different chatrooms. I make a little idle chit-chat. I get in some of the naughty channels. I don't care what you've heard, unless you have the intelligence of a cabbage, cybersex gets real old, real fast. There are only so many ways you can type "Oh, yes, baby, do it just like that." I'm one of those weirdos who thinks that our biggest sexual organ is the brain.

I get bored, so I start showing off in a channel. I defy gravity, I make things appear and disappear, I dance all over the room. A little voice in the back of my mind tells me "you do realize you're just trying to get attention because you're lonely, don't you?" I tell the little voice what to go do with itself.

But there's someone in the room who likes my shenanigans. Her nom de cybre is AbbyCat, and she joins in the fun. And after we play for a while in the public room, we create a little private room for a more intimate chat. Our chatting becomes incredibly naughty, only this time it's actually interesting. The woman on the other end has intelligence, charm, and a sense of humor. Frankly, you don't find too many of those in the naughty chatrooms, because they've been chased away by HNGs who have the personalities of leeches and the imagination of slugs.

We continue for a while, enjoying the roleplaying aspects of our cybersexual fun 'n' games. I suggest that what we're doing shouldn't be called cybersex, it should be called Interactive Participatory Erotic Literature, and LOLs fill the screen.

And at last, when sleep beckons, we say goodbye and promise to meet again in the same channel. I turn off the computer and go to bed.

BEATING OF HEARTS

AbbyCat isn't on the next evening, and I call it quits early, bored with it all. I get a little reading done--I used to read a hell of a lot more before my Internet addiction claimed me. I bury my nose in a novel and try to forget the singleness that I seem to be eternally trapped in.

The next night I get lucky. When I log on, I discover she's been waiting for me. We go back to our private room and pick up from where we left off two nights before. We play for a while, but the lure of good conversation eventually draws us away from the naughty stuff. We chat about everything under the sun. As the conversation flows along, I am amazed at how close we are in temperament, desires, tastes, ambitions, philosophy. We share so many things, and I'm so excited. I try to reign in my eagerness, it's too easy to get burned. What if this is some clever 15-year-old boy having a laugh? What if it's Hannibal Lecter trying to invite me over for a gourmet meal? What if it's a NASA computer passing the Turing test with flying colors?

But our conversation is so damn amazing that I don't want to believe any of those possibilities. AbbyCat has to be a real person. I will it to be so.

"Look," I tell her, "I'm going to go get a post office box tomorrow." I have a rather overdeveloped sense of paranoia, and I don't much cotton to the idea of issuing maps to where I live over the cybernetic ether.

"Please write me, okay?" She says she will.

SEAGULLS SCREAMING KISS HER, KISS HER

Her first letter arrives. I can't believe it's actually real. I open the envelope and a waft of perfume hits my nose. It is utterly enchanting. Her letter is written on light gray stationary with a delicate silvery embossed border. Little cut-out paper kisses fall to the floor, and I pick them up and smell the perfume on each one. Tucked in the fold of the letter are pictures of her. She's very attractive. Her name--at least, the name I choose to give her to protect her identity--is Kathy.

Kathy's letter is wonderful, confirming all the opinions I developed of her in IRC. Here is absolutely everything I've ever looked for in a woman--beauty, intelligence, wit, a wonderful sense of humor, a loathing of pettiness and deceit, and a love of simple pleasures. Of course, the paranoid part of my brain keeps whispering it could still be a hoax. "These are just pictures," it whispers. "They could be of anyone. Hannibal Lecter could have written this letter and included photos of his last meal." Paranoia can be such a downer.

I sit on the edge of my bed with a spiral-bound notebook and write a response to her letter. An actual, hand-written response, from a person who never, ever, ever writes actual, hand-written responses. I want to go slow. I want to be cautious. I want to handle this situation with delicacy and care. Oh, who am I kidding? I want to jump straight into the fire and buy a plane ticket. But my paranoia reigns me in, just a little.

My letter goes out, I wait, a reply comes back. After a couple of exchanges, I even go out and buy very pretty stationary with dolphins and seagulls on it, simply because I think she deserves it. Each letter becomes slightly more intense, each letter reveals a little more about the writer.

The more I learn about Kathy, the more I like her. I quickly discover we are cut from the same cloth, even down to our shared paranoia. There is a rather frightening word that begins to hover in the space between us, both of us thinking it until I finally name it: soulmates. Both of us believed in soulmates back when we were young and idealistic and openly hopeless romantics, before the scars of bad relationships and bad luck in general turned us into bitter cynics. Soulmates? A very big word, that.

THEN SHE APPEARED

The day comes when writing letters is no longer enough. I have to talk to her on the phone. And so we exchange numbers, and when she calls for the first time, I do not put down the phone for the next six hours. A week later we're making plans for her to come to Birmingham to visit me. So much for caution.

We each take turns racking up enormous phone bills, and we both worry about how fast things are going, but neither one of us can stop. Kathy tells me we're like two cars hurtling toward each other with no brakes. In fact, it's worse than that, because both of us have the gas pedals pressed down to the floorboard. It's a scary feeling, but I can't wait to crash into her.

A few days later, Kathy's paranoia gets the better of her and she decides she can't come to Birmingham, because what if I turn out to be an axe-wielding maniac? Even though she knows I'm not, she's still afraid to come here. I understand this fear all too well, and it's quite reasonable in this kind of situation.

As much as I hate to fly, I have to see her, and quickly. She has gotten completely under my skin, and I'm going crazy. I'm drowning in her, and I haven't even met her. These impulsive things are the actions of the Romeo and Juliet age bracket, not of supposedly sensible adults. I don't care. I'm head over heels in a delirium of emotions over this amazing woman. And so we make plans for me to fly to Maryland.

Now it's my turn to be paranoid. What if I get there and she turns out to be the axe-wielding maniac? What if I get on the plane only to have my hacked-up body discovered days or weeks or months later? What if I just disappear off the face of the Earth? Not to mention the fear of flying I'll have to overcome just so I can risk being dismembered. I'm in for a hellacious emotional roller coaster.

It certainly doesn't help my mental well-being when I happen to read a magazine article about a woman who had done exactly what I'm getting ready to do, and who had been tortured and murdered by the man she had gone to meet. Sick, gruesome, horrible, and not at all conducive to a happy flight into the unknown. I have to call Kathy repeatedly just to hear her voice, because the simple act of talking to her washes away all my doubts and fears. "Besides," I tell her a couple of days before I fly to meet her, "if there's only a fifty percent chance that this is real, and there's also a fifty percent chance that the Spanish Inquisition will be waiting for me when I get off the plane to take me to some secret dungeon and do unspeakable things to me, I'll still go." She thinks that's sweet, but my stomach does some amazing acrobatics once I hang up the phone.

By the time the plane lands in Baltimore, I'm a raw bundle of nerves. I'm starting to think that something far more terrifying than the Spanish Inquisition will be waiting for me. I'm starting to think that Kathy will really be all the things I believe her to be. How am I going to cope with that?

And there she is, waiting for me at the gate. The flat images of the pictures she'd sent me suddenly made solid and real. We hug. I can't believe that I'm actually here. We hold hands as we walk to the airport parking deck. We laugh, partially from nerves and partially because it feels good to finally be face-to-face. We sit in the back of the car while her cousin chauffeurs, and I just stare and stare at her, and we giggle and cuddle, and then I kiss her.

GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

Kathy is a down-home country girl, a perfect contrast to my boring suburbanite background. She's a paradox: a waterchild, perfectly at home in nature, yet an absolute whiz with computers. "Be careful," she tells me on my second day in Maryland, "every man I've ever dated has turned into a redneck." I can only smile, look around at the lush, gorgeous scenery, Kathy included, and say, "Ahem...yee-haw!" As long as I don't have to chew tobacco, own firearms or gunracks, hunt deer, drive a pickup truck, carry open beverage containers in the aforementioned pickup truck, or watch NASCAR racing, I'll be quite happy to call myself a redneck. I've always wanted to get back to nature.

We do a lot of talking and a lot of laughing. We tell each other our hopes and dreams. We hold hands and walk underneath the stars--my god, I'd forgotten just how many stars there are when you get away from the glare of the city. We make wild, passionate, joyous, giggling, electric, gasping-for-breath, ecstatic love. I am happier with her than I have ever been in my entire life.

And then my four days are up. I hold her before she takes me to the airport. I want to stay. She wants me to stay. But it's just not possible right now. The wonderful little world we've lived in for this extended weekend has to be broken up; the real world demands it. We get to the airport with fifteen minutes to spare, and make a public spectacle of ourselves with our constant kissing and hugging and groping. I don't care. The dreaded announcement comes, commanding me to get on the plane. I give her one last hug and kiss. The guy who takes my ticket smiles at me and says "hey, hey, none of that! You're making me miss my wife!"

EPILOGUE: 1000 UMBRELLAS

Everything you've read so far, stylistic and grammatical revisions aside, was written after that first joyful trip. I was walking on clouds in a total delirium of visions of the future. At long last, I had met my soulmate.

And the second trip, which lasted a grand and glorious two-and-a-half weeks, brought us closer than I could even imagine when I wrote the first draft of this remembrance. I saw myself there, in Maryland, for the rest of my life, growing old with this woman. I love my family dearly, but to grab the golden ring that presents itself to you once in life if you're very, very lucky, to actually meet someone about whom you can say "this is my other half," I would have gladly packed my belongings and contented myself with visiting my family on holidays. In a heartbeat.

And if that weren't enough, the third trip surely would have fixed my future path on that singleminded course. Except for one little problem.

Out of all the relationships Kathy had been in, I was the one who treated her best.

Let me rephrase that: every prior relationship Kathy had been in was, in some way, abusive. There had been emotional abuse. There had been physical abuse. One asshole used to get drunk and beat her up fairly regularly. One ex-boyfriend had stalked her.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

It doesn't matter that anyone who knows me knows that I wouldn't hurt a fly. It doesn't matter that I treated her with nothing but love and respect every second we were together. What matters is that she had been hurt so much for so long that she could not erase the fear at the back of her mind: "What if this guy turns out to be just like the others?"

I knew this. We spent a great deal of time discussing it, both in person and on the phone.

But no amount of discussion can erase a fear like that (something I know well from my own, if very different, fears). And so, it didn't come entirely out of the blue when in January of this year she called to tell me that it was over, that she couldn't handle the relationship moving to the next level.

Christ.

The keyboard that I'm typing this with isn't really equipped to display in a graphical form the misery I fell into. I mean, how do you quantify something like that and translate it into a little word-picture so everyone can look at it and say "yes indeed, that sure musta been painful!" Maybe a terrifyingly loud, guttural, tear-soaked primal scream that wakes the whole f***ing neighborhood and leaves your throat raw and your body drained would get the point across, but I'm not sure how to format that in HTML.

Anyway, that was almost 11 months ago, and like a dutiful little trooper, I've since picked myself back up and soldiered on. To where, I haven't a clue yet. I certainly haven't "gotten over" her, no matter how many times I keep telling myself that I have. Nor am I sure if it's even possible to "get over" the loss of a soulmate.

Cynic that I am, I guess I can always hope for lightning to strike twice. Even if I don't believe it.

�1998 Jeremy Jacobs

---------- Jeremy Jacobs that opinionated music guy...
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