The Virtual Love....

Well, this is from the time when Yahoo! was the gateway connecting you to new people! Remember those chat rooms where we’d spend hours trying to make random conversations with complete strangers. We’ve all had our online crushes, the mystery girls/ guys who could in real life very well have been guys/ girls, if you know what I mean.  Those of us born in the late eighties and early nineties will know what I am talking about, this was much before Hi5! Orkut or Facebook came into existence.

And Yes! The Chatroom had categories: Romance, Business, Games, Family, Haha!!

Remember the hilarious screen names people used like li’ldude, imsohawt, teenqueen, promiscuousgirl, and surprisingly they almost always worked; “The wackier the screen name, the better your chance of striking a conversation with someone!!!” 

I too had an alias - 2fast4you. Creepy as it may sound, believe you me I had a lot of girls pinging me in the various national/ international chat rooms I visited... Once I found a certain Atsui sitting there in a Bombay chat room (for musicians). The name teased my inquisitiveness and I decided to say hello.

2fast4you – Hi! ASL? (Short for, Age, sex location and to come to think of it now, Pretty Darn cheesy)

Atsui – Hey! I’m 14/ girl/ Pune. You?

2fast4you – Rahul/ 16/ Mumbai

And that’s how we started talking with a fake name and a fake city! She was perfect and the most interesting person I happened to meet online. It was comforting enough to know that we shared the same interest in music, books, TV shows, and movies… and I ended up spending 3 hours talking to ‘atsui’ that first night. It was unbelievable, I found someone as awesome as her online!  

We became regular chat friends; I couldn’t wait to come back from school to have my online date with atsui, even if it meant giving up my game of football. In less than 2 weeks, we’d shared most of our secrets. We’d be chatting, dedicating songs to each other all the time! We mutually decided it was time to really see each other. We didn’t have webcams  and therefore decided to send each other our pictures. She was using an O2 so it was easy for her to send me her picture, and Man! Was she beautiful!  I’d met the perfect girl and I believed I was falling in love big time! I picked my best picture (the one my mom loved the most) and scanned it in the school computer lab to mail her.

Bandwidth, those days wasn’t too great during the day (excess traffic) so I would get up late night to download games/ movies.  As it turned out we would end up chatting all night till around 5 A.M. just before our folks woke us up for school. We had been chatting for 3 months now but we had never really spoken!

One fine day she decided to tell me that she was falling in love with me (I couldn’t have been happier).   But dating, wasn’t something I had given much thought to, more so dating ONLINE (someone I had never met). So well, I just sent an “LOL”!!

Atsui – I love you **%$^!

2fast4you – lol, really?

Atsui – what do you mean really? Why would I be joking?

2fast4you – lol, its funny we haven’t even spoken yet! But how hot am i? lol

Atsui – Well! Fuck off dude!

2fast4you – Come on! Chill..

Atsui – I gotta go! Ttyl..

Atsui signed out!

Faaacccckkk!! She signed out! I was desperate to tell her I loved her too! I stayed online all night that night and the night after and the whole week! But she didn’t show up! After a few weeks, I figured she’d got herself a new ID and wasn’t coming back.

Atsui was gone and I was sad, but life moves on, and I met kariii_love a few days later and she was nice too. It had been 3 – 4 months and I’d almost forgotten about atsui, when one day I went online and saw an offline message from Atsui! She was back! I couldn’t have been more excited. She wanted to catch up the next evening. It the longest day of my life waiting for school to get over! We picked up exactly where we had left! We chatted all night again! But this time she told me she was dating this guy from school and there you go, my heart sank!!.

We only chatted once a week after that. By then we had exchanged numbers and so we’d drop text messages to each other once in a while, though they stopped gradually. Until one day, a few months before my board exams I got a text from atsui asking me to come online..I felt the pang of happiness and excitement in my chest all over again.

She had broken up and this translated to  longer and more frequent online dates than ever before. Soon I told her I was in love with her. Before I knew it I was dating, for the first time in my life. And it was perfect, she was cuter than all the girls in my school, I’d never seen her in real life but I could tell! We didn’t have any idea about how short long distance relationships really work and In less than 6 of the most passionate months of our lives we decided to break up! And did my heart break again, that too for the same girl!

PS >> I’m still friends with this girl! And I still haven’t met her, despite being in the same city a couple of times (Guess, we just like being virtually present in each other’s lives and don’t want to screw it up). We hardly talk but when we do, it’s just the same like it was 7 years back! It’s unbelievable how you can have such a bond with someone you haven’t met, but I found my soul mate online and I know I can call her when I’m down and tell her I love her and know that she loves me back!

PPS>>About the Author (Yes, this article has been written by my friend and NOT me): He’s an absolute nutcase who’s writing a blog post for the first time and doesn’t even want his name to be disclosed. He's actually smart, funny, "pretty fast for thy girls" Aaaand he's hot!! haha.. (I was made to write this :P), But thanksss for writing this (xoxo) and keeping the blog alive...  ;) :D