Tonight I've got a story that's been milling around in my head for about 8 years. It's a true story that happened to me.
I remember in the early days of the internet, say 1996 or so, I would spend my internet time chatting with people in Yahoo chat. In one of my normal rooms I sat and waded through profiles as idle chatter ensued. I usually didn't bother to talk to anyone unless they had an interesting profile or they said something in chat that peeked my curiosity. On this particular day though I saw one woman's profile who was around the same age as me and lived within 45 mins from me. I debated trying to talk to her but decided against it and instead just left the room I was in to look for something more lively. Not more than a minute after I left the room the person I had been eyeing up sent me a private message saying "Hey". She told me she found a link to my Angelfire page on my profile and had been reading all the poetry and stuff I'd posted. After she expressed having a deep love of poetry and literature we proceeded to become good friends.
Despite the fact that she lived relatively close to me not long after we started talking her family moved to Washington but we continued to remain in contact with each other. We talked on the phone a lot, sent messages back and forth on Yahoo Messenger, and even had some video chat sessions. For the better part of 10 years we talked, sometimes almost every day then other times only once in a month or so. No matter what though it was always easy to catch up and get back to our normal flow. We talked about everything and we both shared some deep bonding moments. I remember we had an inside joke that if neither of us was married or dating by the time I turned 30 she'd marry me. lol.
Now sometimes I wonder if it would be possible to find her on the internet. The only reason we stopped talking at all was because the phone I had at the time just stopped working and I lost all my contacts (this was way before the time of cloud technology, heck was even before flip phones were out of style) and since I had no real ties to that particular phone carried I switched to a different one and lost my old number. I had tried to reach her after that through Yahoo mail and messenger but I'm pretty sure she stopped using that account. I even eventually stopped using the account I used to talk to her.
The most tragic part is that in 10 years of knowing this woman over a long distance we never once actually exchanged any information beyond our phone numbers that we could use to seek each other out should we lose that source. I didn't even know her real email address. We were, however, on a first name basis at least. Let me tell you that knowing a first name is a not the best start to finding someone either, especially if it's a common first name.
I'm not sure why I think about trying to contact her again. We were both really close at one point in time, if we had been living closer together we'd have been dating. That was all a long time ago though. I'm not even sure she would remember who I am or what I would even say to her. I also think that maybe I'm better off leaving this alone so I can remain content with my memories of this person. Sometimes the passage of time isn't good to us or she could even be happily married by now.
All in all it's just a big question mark in my life and while I do have quite a few, I know from past experience they aren't all worth investigating. More recent re-connections I've made because of the powers of Facebook have got me wondering though...