I'm cagey about what I post about myself online: years ago, the wrong kinds of people found my personal writings, and made them agonizingly public. In those days, the internet was a lot smaller - the sort of place you had to sit down at a desktop to access. It was inconvenient. You couldn't just pull out your phone and start scrolling, as the iPhone was nearly a decade out. But even then, if you were tenacious, you could find things. People. Since then, I've had to assume everyone I've ever met is reading everything I post online, even if, as is most likely, the opposite is true.
I say this because earlier in one of my group chats, we were talking about photos, of us, when we were younger. And I had to admit that I had I think one picture of me as a baby, a black-and-white portrait taken by my grandfather. I'm in a onesie, standing by our old family couch, a Rupert annual open beside me (thank you, English relatives). A shock of curly hair. A stunned expression on my face.
And then, nothing; I have nothing else, I moved out of the house when I was 21 and didn't really take many photos before that, or take any with me, and then I moved across the country twice, packing as little as I could each time. When I moved east, I took maybe a dozen books. I had no money. I was so broke. I couldn't afford not to pack light.
So I didn't really pack any photos. I got a webcam when I was 17 or so, the ubiquitous eyeball variety, so I do have some pictures of myself at that age (grainy, and at low resolution). But I have nothing when I was younger: elementary school, high school, etc. I'm sure photos exist, buried in friends' parents' basements. But in some sense, my image of myself starts when high school was ending.
I've written in the past about how my memory of my early life is hazy, especially high school. At the time, I didn't take many pictures. You had to have a camera. Cheap Kodak and Fujifilm disposables existed, but I never thought to get one. Why bother? I was going to remember all this, right? But I didn't understand that certain events of the mid 90s would wreak havoc on my long-term memory of that era. I've had very few romantic relationships, or even encounters, in my life. There's my wife, who I met in my late teens and started dating a few years later. Before her, there was the person I met through a web forum for fucked-up teens, with whom I had a long distance relationship, the length of which is difficult to pin down, being, as I was, eventually ghosted. And then, in the far distance, my first relationship, which was not good, and I won't say anything else as to why.
I met my wife through music - we both played in a band. But she was the first and only romantic relationship I came to offline. There was the aforementioned relationship found through that forum; the first girlfriend I met through local dialup bulletin boards. And I'm writing this because the group chat discussion we were having earlier triggered a memory, an awkward date I had when I was...16? 17? With a girl I'd been chatting with through random chat.
I should be more specific: it was ICQ random chat. And I should explain it, because it's such a wild and fucked-up feature of the early web, the kind of feature you'd never find today. You could set your sex, age, location in ICQ. And people could search by that (or some combination thereof) to find you. It sounds insane, right? And it is. But I met one of my best friends that way, one of the people in the group chat. She and another friend were looking for guys to chat with/mess with, and found me. And at some point we all realized that we actually liked each other a lot, and became close friends, each of us thousands of kilometres from the others.
We've never met. We may never meet. But this entry isn't about that. This entry is about a date I had when I was maybe 16, maybe 17, and maybe neither of these. The truth is that I can't remember, that I can place dates reliably after I left high school, and before, but not within those four years. There's a reason for that. I won't talk about that. This entry isn't about that.
I had a date with a girl and her name was Brea. She found me through ICQ's random chat (as a number of others did), and we chatted for a while, and it was okay. We didn't click, I didn't light up when she came online, like with the friends I mentioned above. But we'd chat regularly, and eventually she asked me if I wanted to get coffee, that being very much the subtext in the 90s that we were going to go on a date.
I'm writing about this because I only remembered the details, and her name, today. I'm writing about this because it's both a generally inconsequential detail in my life, and also a memory of a very particular point in time. Apps have taken over the online world, and so many people now meet via apps and their mediated matches, whether that's Tinder, Grindr, Fetlife, whatever. But meeting people online in the decade before social media was different. More personal. Brea and I chatted for weeks before we finally decided to meet. We probably shouldn't have gone for coffee, but we did.
We met at a coffeeshop maybe a ten minute walk from my house. It was on the 2nd floor of an old brick building, with its windows looking out on to the flower-lined streets outside. Very little lighting inside, reliant on the natural light that flooded in through the windows. There were overstuffed arm chairs. Trivial pursuit questions at each table. It was cozy. It should have been nice. Instead, it was kind of excruciating.
For two hours, the entire conversation was her talking her ex-boyfriend: what an asshole he was, the ways in which he hurt her, and unspoken but obvious, how much she wanted him back. I remember that Brea was blonde, a little heavyset, maybe a bit cute, but neither pretty nor ugly. More than that I remember the profound sense of sadness that hovered around her. She wanted him back. Asking me for a date helped her feel less lonely. Talking to me might've helped too. But it was clear that he was there in that cafe, too, sitting between us.
I didn't have a girlfriend for a long time. There were reasons for this, and years later, when I started dating the person I met through the web forums, my sister confided in me that I'd shown so little interest in the opposite sex that she thought I might've been gay (this, again, being the 90s, the options were basically straight, gay, bi). No, just dealing with things, things I've never discussed with her, but need to eventually; and, I guess, going on bad dates with people I met through random chat.
I'm leaving a lot out of this. I suspect Brea was as well. If I found the date awkward, maybe she did too; maybe I was too quiet, too thin, too awkward, not the sort of muscle-and-trucks guy she was looking for. I'm writing this because I remembered all this and it needs to go somewhere. And if I knew Brea's last name, it's long gone, and if I'm being honest, I doubt she'd remember a single thing about me. I haven't had many relationships, barely any dates outside of them, and just a single one-night stand. I only remember this one afternoon because Brea was one of the few people outside of the core romantic figures in my life who ever showed any interest in me. But if she were to sit down and write down the story of her life, I know I wouldn't feature. I was a guy she talked to online, and once at a cafe for a couple of hours.
But Brea, I remember you, even if only in that hazy, diaphanous way of the decades-past. I hope you found something, found someone; I hope you didn't get back with the guy who hurt you again and again and again. Twenty-five years later (or twenty-six? twenty-seven?) all I can say is, I hope you're happy. I hope you're doing well. I'm doing better now than I was then; I hope that you are too.