Sh*t Hits the Fan

As summer faded into fall, I started my graduate year. I moved off campus into a house with roommates, and started working full time for a major company. I was busier than I had ever been in my life but something didn’t feel right. I would take time out of my busy schedule and email NeverTooLate, but it was taking longer and longer for her to email me back. The emails were shorter and shorter too. She wrote that her daughters were going back to school and that one of them was having a hard time. Apparently she had problems making friends and her one friend had moved away over the summer. She was really busy but would try to write more next time.

It finally got to the point where I had to know where we stood. I did not understand the distance between us and could not figure out how things had gotten so bad that I was afraid to send emails for fear that she wouldn’t respond. I worked up the nerve to email her and ask her where we stood with the phone call. I told her I was not trying to be pushy and that if she wasn’t ready that was ok. I explained that it seemed to me like maybe she wasn’t ready and that was ok with me, I just wanted to know where we stood.

For once, it didn’t take her long to email me back. She explained that she was sorry for hurting me, but that she really wasn’t ready for a phone conversation. There had been a time when she thought she was ready for a phone conversation, but that the time past and she wasn’t sure when or even if she would ever be ready again. She explained that she was feeling so much like a scared little girl again and she didn’t want to feel that way anymore. Then she put an interesting line in the email. She wrote: “You have every right to get in touch with anybody to let them know you are ok.” I’m not sure how you all feel about the meaning behind this line, but I knew how I took it and I called up my friends and family and asked them what they thought.

I didn’t tell them what I was calling about, but read them the paragraph and asked them what they thought she meant by it. Of the four other people I called, not one of them had a different opinion than me. We all thought that she was giving me permission to get in touch with SinginInTheRain. I had the right to get in touch with him! I was so excited! I wasn’t sure how to proceed from here though. I didn’t have his email, and I knew sending a letter to the house was risky because one of the girls might find it. I could have emailed NeverTooLate for his email address, but she had already backed out of the phone conversation and I didn’t want to give her the chance to back out of this too.

I had found both NeverTooLate and SinginInTheRain on Facebook a few months before and had kept that to myself. After a lot of thought but before NeverTooLate could change her mind, I decided to take the plunge and sent SinginInTheRain a very brief and short private message on Facebook. I described who I was and told him that I thought we might be related and left my personal email address. I sent it off and started waiting for a response for the second time, which was almost worse than the first time. And now the Lifetime movie kind of life continues…