Thank God For Chance Meetings, Chances Are Our Best Things, Up There With Ocean Waves, And Sleeping In All Day

--"Intentions", Whispertown2000

Speaking of chance meetings...

My parents have never owned a proper computer, which necessitated my having to go over to my friends' house to utilize anything resembling a normal entertainment and utilitarian computing device. From the time I was at St. Rita's till a couple of years into college I never knew what it was like to have such a wonderful device at my disposal. You can imagine, then, when I was a senior in high school I was rather technology-starved.

Thus, when my friend Dan proposed a bargain of my driving him back home so he could make lunch in exchange for having access to his computer, along with my being able to log on to his Prodigy account, I jumped at the chance. I had utilized the service a couple of years prior through my cousin and I knew it was right up my alley. I knew that through it I could connect with people that I normally would never ever even see in my lifetime. I knew that through it I would possibly be exposed to a whole other avenue of experiencing the world that I didn't have in my own household. Mostly, though, I thought it would be fun to play the games and somewhat surf the burgeoning web. All that other stuff was prosiac reasoning in lieu of the immediate gratification of having something else to do besides stare at the same old boring faces at lunch.

It was also during this time that I first got entranced with a tiny show called Avonlea. I couldn't get enough of it. I watched it two hours a night. I memorized lines. I literally became obsessed with everything about it. I started to dress like the characters on the show. I started to adopt their speech patterns. People began to question my sanity and, looking back, I couldn't blame them. I was acting even weirder than I normally did. However, for the most part, I cared little. The show arrived at a point in my life that was highly stressful--worrying about college, worrying about staying in touch with my high school friends, worrying about what the next step was. It filled up a hole in my life that I never knew existed and, for that, it really was a goodsend.

Little did I know that the show would also lead me to one of the biggest forces of good in my life as well.

I arrived one afternoon for lunch with Daniel in tow at his parents' place. He stayed downstairs to make his lunch, while I went up to his room, my lunch still firmly in its brown paper bag, and began to log on as he had shown me weeks before. I went through the usual rigamorale, checking various avenues as fit the pattern of "surfing" I had set out for myself. In the prior days to that afternoon, I had made a habit of checking the Avonlea bulletin board for anything I could glean about the show. In fact, I had learned a great deal of information that wasn't readily available to us unlucky folks in the U.S.. I had also met a few fellow fans as I began to see the same screen names creep up time and time again on their posts. I had also started a few threads about the show on my own, including one that mentioned Sarah Polley, the actress who portrayed the main character on the program, as being the most talented actress ever.

Imagine my chagrin when I found a reply waiting for me that mentioned the author finding Miss Polley "rather boring."

I was livid. More to the point, I was incensed enough to fire off a two-page defense of my beloved actress. I stressed how much talent she possessed for someone so young. I emphasized her amazing ability to cry often at the drop at a hat and to make me believe she was crying for real. I glorified her amazing beauty, disarming grace, and her natural intelligence. In short, I made my feelings of pride for her so well-known that the author had no choice but to acquiesce that Sarah was something special.

Something she did the very next day upon receiving such a heft reply.

Then a strange thing happened. Rather than let bygones be bygones, I continued discussing with this selfsame author about the show. Instead of utilizing the bulletin board as it was intended, this author and I through the course of a couple of weeks, began a dialogue exclusively back-and-forth, leaving other board members scratching their heads at exactly what was transpiring between us. If you were to ask Dan, I would daresay he might have said that I was slowly commuting my obsession with Avonlea to this fellow fan of the show. Inevitably, our discourse began to drift little by little away from the program and to more personal matters. I started wanting to know who this mysterious stranger was rather than just what her opinion about characters, plots, and themes were. It started to become important to me to learn as much about her as I could.

It turns out she was twelve--a fact which shocked both my friend Dan and I because we had been guessing all over the map from fifteen to twenty-five due to her use of language and her penchant for intelligent argument. (I swear, I've been fooled too many times by intelligent, young woman to make me want to give up even trying ascertaining their ages. I thought Breanne was in the range of twenty to twenty-five when I first encountered her and I guessed Carly was twenty to twenty-two when I met her.) It turns out she was far more intelligent than I had been at her age. She played multiple instruments, was interested in all matter of subjects--including The Holocaust, ever since reading The Diary of Anne Frank in first grade (!!!). It also seemed like I amused her highly.

Eventually, we moved our conversation to letters where it stayed for some three good years.

After that, I went to visit her on her fifteenth birthday and had probably one of the most memorable weekends I had ever had.

All that came to an end a few months after that as I proceeed to make definitely the biggest mistake of my life.

That mistake was only fixed early last year and I'm doing everything I can to make sure that it's the only one I make with her.


then we think we’re torn, when really we’re just worn

Her name is Jina. We used to be friends, then we weren't, and now, I guess, we're friends again.

Like I said, it's strange how things happen.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers