First meetings

I first got online in college, in the mid-’80s, using BITNET to flirt with talk to people at other colleges via Relay, the forerunner of IRC. In 1992, I joined the WELL and got my first dial-up ISP account. In other words, in Internet years, I am older than dirt. I say all this not to brag about my practically paleolithic status, but to explain that developing friendships online and transitioning them to the real world afterwards (if at all) is a very familiar concept to me indeed. Still, there’s always something both exciting and scary about meeting people for the first time after having talked to them often for a long time, and even more so when it’s someone with whom I’ve developed a genuine friendship. Will they like me? Will I like them? And then what?

In about seven hours, I’m heading to the airport to pick up someone who’s been a mainstay of my online life for most of the last decade. We chat on IM almost every workday – about writing, health, shoes (oh, how we talk about shoes), love, desire, motivation, family, therapy — and I can safely say she knows things about me that very few other people do. And yet in all these years, we’ve only spoken on the phone once, and we’ve never met.

I can’t wait to find out if we’re still friends in person!

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