Internet Love Stories

Have you ever noticed that the world’s biggest and most famous love stories never have happy ends? Take Romeo and Juliet. Take Rose and Jack in Titanic, or Tristan and Isolde. Yes, there are way enough examples of two people loving each other but not having the possibility of being together. It’s not fair, right? In any way, I never thought I would ever feel like Juliet…or Rose. Or Isolde, for that matter. Well, in my case, it’s not death that seperates us and  it isn’t our families, either. No. In my case, it’s the distance.

But first of all, let me tell you all this from the very beginning on…his name is Lee, and I remember the exact day when we got to know each other; a day that I will always keep in mind: the 8th April 2007. It was coincidence (or shall I dare saying destiny?) how we met; it was coincidence (destiny) that I found his e-mail address on a site he’d registered on to meet new people on the net. On the net! I never thought that exactly that was going to keep us apart. The internet, the distance.

Lee lives in England, I live in Luxembourg. And I’ve got to say, I never thought that such a “relation” could be possible over distance. But I was wrong. For Lee and me, it is sort of special. We’re both individuals, very different from each other, but we complement each other so well. It’s hard to describe. The first three things I noticed about Lee were that he’s good to talk to, that he’s trustworthy, and that he has a really awesome humour.

Three things that are really important to me. But most important of all…he was there. Not literally…but he was always there for me, in spite of the distance. When I wasn’t feeling well, when I was sad, when I was upset and complaining…when everyone else would’ve stopped caring, Lee didn’t. Lee listened patiently to everything I said, for hours. He gave me advices, cheered me up, calmed me down. I told him about my past, my worries, my inferiority complexes, and he just listened and didn’t seem to care when it was 3 in the morning. And he did make me feel better.

It might sound weird, maybe it sounds even completely insane…but when we had those long, private, deep conversations, there was no distance; he was right with me, he was so close. Lee has always managed to make me laugh until that I have tears of laughter in my eyes. Like I said, he has an awesome humour that is difficult to understand or to accept for some people.Well, when I noticed that I only smiled when I talked to him on MSN and that I went crazy when I couldn’t talk to him, I also realized that this was way more than just a good friendship. I had fallen in love with Lee. I knew it would be too complicated, so I tried to hide it for months and to carry on as if nothing had happened. But the truth just didn’t leave and it got more and more unsupportable for me each day.

So one night, I worked up all my courage and I told him about my feelings. That moment was an awful one, because I really thought I was going to lose him over that. I thought he might think I’ve lost all my sanity. I thought he might say that this just couldn’t be possible. Falling in love over internet is quite critical after all. I really doubted he would ever want something to do with me again.But luckily I was wrong. Lee reacted in such an awesome way. He said we both felt better now that it was out, and that he absolutely wanted to stay friends with me. He said he liked me as a friend but didn’t want a girlfriend at the time.  But he also cared about how I felt about this and told me not to feel guilty whatsoever because we won’t be together. Well, it wasn’t a positive answer, not the one I would’ve dreamed of. But it was a better one than I had expected.

Plus, I NEVER expected him to love me back. So, we tried to let it shoot over us and just move on as usual. He could, but it was very difficult for me.

Then something changed. I started dating some blokes, tried to get my mind off Lee, tried to fall out of love. And he got weird towards me. Suddenly he started cold-shouldering me. It was like talking to a totally different person. The Lee who’d comforted me, calmed me, made me laugh, that I trusted blindly just started belonging to the past. Back then I didn’t know why. He hardly talked to me. And I had no clue what was wrong. I asked him a few times, and soon we started argueing all the time because I told him I had the feeling he was trying to avoid me. I couldn’t accept that he had less time. Even worse, he thought I wasn’t grateful for everything he’d done for me; he was angry because I complained about him not liking me.

One night, we had a terrible row. Lee said he was past caring now that I was questioning our entire friendship, the entire past 6 months we had gotten on so well. We thought it might be better not to keep in touch, well, we didn’t think that actually. But it happened.Lee and me didn’t speak to each other anymore. It was such an awful time for me. At first, I felt kind of free, though. Freed out of that virtual world…I saw the world with new eyes.

But after some time, I realized that something was missing. Something, someone I just couldn’t make it without anymore. And that was Lee. When I laughed, it wasn’t the same anymore. When I cried, it wasn’t the same either. When I was on MSN and saw that he was online without talking to me, I died a hundred times.I felt kind of empty without him. I felt as if a part of me had disappeared. Well, both of us are very stubborn, but after a month or two, I decided to forget about my stubborness for once and make it up to him, because the last thing I wanted was to lose that friendship.

Well, at the beginning we struggled getting along with each other because of all that had happened, but I suppose our friendship was strong enough to hold despite of quite some stuff, and somehow we made it. Our friendship got better and better,  and I was happy.

Happy for having such a wonderful friend.

But one day I noticed something fundamental, something that I didn’t want to notice over all those months: there was only one boy for me and no one else mattered.Well, the thing is, Lee is really one of a kind. He’s a bit special, let me put it that way. He likes joking around a lot, sometimes he makes fun of things you just don’t make fun of, and sometimes he just says the wrong things. A lot of people told me how dumb he was, told me to forget about him, and well, I had tried. It’s true.

I’ve called him an idiot so many times, told him to bugger off; on some days I really hated him and felt like slapping him right in the face…but what am I supposed to do when I realize that I’ve loved him through it all?

When I realize that the other people just don’t have a clue? They don’t. They just can’t imagine what it’s like between Lee and me. They don’t know what we’ve been through. But I, I won’t forget that he’s the one who’s always been there for me when others weren’t. I won’t forget the fact that he makes me laugh, that he makes my day when I feel down.

But most of all, I won’t forget about this trust. There’s hardly anyone I tell as much as I tell Lee. Lee said himself once: “I am your diary.” - It’s true. Once he said he’d like to read my diary, but there’s no point - he knows everything anyway.

Well, apart from one thing of course. That I love him again. Maybe he does know, I tell him from time to time, but somehow I’ve got the feeling that he takes it all for a big joke. How the hell am I supposed to know if he never ever shows his feelings?

Maybe I’m ‘only’ a good friend for him. And our friendship means the world to me, it does. It’s a really really strong friendship that resisted so much already. It resisted when I got on his nerves or when he got on mine…all the time. When I told him I love him the first time. It also resisted when we had all our rows, when we didn’t speak to each other for over a month. It resisted through all the times I hated him. And through all the times I’ve loved him.

Basically, we’ve been to hell and back again, but through it all, he’s always been my best friend. And even more than that. If only I was with him…and there it is again: the fundamental problem I talked about before: the distance.

But probably, we’ll never meet. I’m taking my final exams this year, planning to go to University in England in July 2009. Which is exactly the time when Lee plans to join the army. The timing couldn’t be worse. And that makes me very very sad. I’ve imagined so often what it would be like if we lived in the same town. We could meet up as often as we wanted to. We would probably be even better friends than we are now. And probably we would’ve been long together.

The distance gets more and more unbearable each day…but will we ever have the opportunity to look into each others eyes? Will I ever have the opportunity to hold him in my arms?If this is a story like Romeo and Juliet, I suppose not.

….To be continued?!?….

Popularity: 31% [?]