4. my story - across the digital rainbow

This is how T slipped into my life, as a side note, cosied up between two parentheses.

It would be another two years before I found myself naked in his bed, his finger slipped in between the bracketed walls of my cunt.

Before the moans we were just black font on a white screen.

You see, in the beginning, all I had with T was this curious ‘e-mailing’ relationship.

It is always odd to look back on our e-mails from those times. It is hard for me to even truly realize that we are the same two people today who wrote those emails back then.

Probably because we are not.

They stand on their own, these emails, in the own surreal bubble of our interchange.

We did not write frequently. He knew I had a boyfriend. These were not romantic emails. There was nothing sexual about our writing. We knew little about the real everyday details of our lives. Nothing especially profound. No flurry of deep soul searching pages-long emails about life.

(Well,I did write one once, but I’ll get back to that later)

Just two random people exchanging random thoughts.

Looking back and reading them all, it strikes me how, strangely, right from the set-go, we constantly showered each other with little compliments. He would admit that he found me beautiful. Would tell me how honest and genuine he found me. I would start off an email by telling him how great/witty/eloquent he was, or how I couldn’t keep myself from writing to him.

Yes, there was always that element of ‘we shouldn’t be doing this’ between us. I had introduced the element a couple of emails in when I had panicked and wrote to him, had put a surprising amount of thought into it, detailing why I did not want to continue writing to him.

I knew back then I suppose; I was already afraid, almost sure of the time when I would let myself succumb to his charms. His temptation, once presented, had to be consummated eventually, it was just a question of when and how.

(And he did tempt me. His warmth, his passion, tempted me then. As his want whispered in my ear tempts me now.)

He answered back telling me how he certainly had never meant to intrude on the territory of my boyfriend and me. And then of course, I had to answer back. And it went on from there. We stayed on ‘occasional emailing terms’ across the 'digital rainbow’, as he had called it once.

It all seems so silly, I know. But we really did miss each other when we didn’t write. And it’s hard to understand why. There was no real substance behind to back it up, little that we knew about each other, little that we had said.

But there was some kind of recognition, some connection. Maybe some hope for our lives that we projected onto each other.

I am debating posting excerpts from these emails so you get an idea of what I’m talking about...

But I’ll refrain because, despite revealing little, they are private, between us, and nearer to my heart than I can understand. Somehow more intimate then anything I can tell you about our phone conversations or sex lives.

I hesitate even now to talk about them. There is an innocence, a freshness to them that I wish to remain untainted.

What is this nostalgia I have, now that he and I have moved on to another chapter?

Most of all I wonder if in real life, he still finds me as real as he did back then, in the days of our virtual interaction.