my penpal
We first encountered each other on a videogame forum in the summer of 1992. I was about to enter university. She was a precocious high school freshman. This was a forum on Prodigy, before either of us had discovered the Internet, and we had taken to swapping juvenile fanfic that turned into private messages about what books we were ripping off for inspiration. Somehow, that led to us exchanging snail mail addresses, and then writing each other letters. I could still remember sitting in the university cafeteria, eating my lunch, and unfolding a new letter from her, filled with stories of teenage flirtation, feedback on drafts that I had sent her, and all sorts of interesting observations that can come to a Southern girl in Connecticut. Those letters were tucked away in envelopes and saved in small boxes that have moved from dorm room to dorm room and apartment to apartment.
I remember one summer, before driving down to New York, I wrote to her and arranged to meet at a Starbucks near her house. It was the first time that we ever met in person and we were perhaps a bit nervous, but I don't remember much beyond the fact that I was so pleased to actually meet her; to know that she was just as verbal, smart and keenly perceptive in person as she was in her letters. We kept writing and kept apologizing for the gap in time between each letter, like the act of writing letters by hand was itself not exceptional.
Our correspondence changed a bit after I graduated and she entered Swarthmore for university. It moved to email and off the page, and we swapped notes on being college journalists, having nerd friends and the ways that our lives were steadily getting a little more complicated as we each got older. Then, as a sign of how small our worlds can be, when I met amadea one of her first questions was, "are you Cris? My roommate knows you."
I still remember the way amadea once described our friend when they were both on the cusp of graduation. "She'll be ok. She has a way of succeeding once she knows what she wants and how to get it."
... a week from tomorrow, I'm getting on a plane to New York to catch a plane to Paris, to catch
a plane to Lyon, to catch a train to Grenoble, where I'll be studying this semester ... There is a
rational part of me that knows that not all French people are as nasty as the woman who gave me my
visa and that I will have a great time. The rest of me, having never been abroad, having never spent
20 hours traveling at a stretch, having never needed to speak another language for any length of time
is extremely nervous.
Our correspondence changed again after she graduated. I got an LJ and she setup a Diaryland account, and we'd track each other second hand through our updates. She moved to New York, started writing for a Really Cool International Weekly Magazine, and our conversations would be about politics, economics and the rise of the Pacific Rim. I will always remember that I got my first introduction to Korean Cinema by way of her blog. Once, she came up to visit when I was still living in Brookline. We talked about the choices that we were making, about the way we both moved around a lot growing up, and how or when one decides to stay.
in answer to your question about In The Mood For Love. YES. Total Date Movie. I would've
made out with a tree afterwards if I didn't have company around.
We met again a year or so later, after she moved back to her hometown of Atlanta. I was doing a roadtrip through the south, couchsurfing my way through Raleigh, Tuscaloosa, DC and Philly, and I had stopped in Atlanta to sleep on her couch, play boardgames with her friends, and listen to waiters sing "Amazing Grace" in the middle of a dining rush. After years of being at different life stages -- her in high school while I was in college, her in college while I had graduated -- this felt like we had gotten to some level of balance, where the years between us didn't seem to be that significant and it was less about giving or receiving advice and more about just sharing things that we enjoyed.
but: I did want to say, thank you for this. and thank you for getting back on LJ and talking about Hong Kong tailors and AirBNB China stays. I feel like I've got your friendship back, however remotely.
She lives in Atlanta now with her husband, two kids, a new career, an LJ and a K-pop blog. We leave comments on each other's entries, sometimes like the other's Facebook status, and sometimes, when it's important and one of us is having a tough time, we'll write an email to say that we're thinking about them and to apologize about how long it's been since we last wrote something substantial for each other, like the act of being friends for twenty years and seeing the ways we've both grown and evolved was, itself, not exceptional.