thelesbianlifestyle.com

Fallen for a straight girl? Me? That would be the height of insanity, wouldn’t it? But, of course I did! Back when way more people didn’t have Internet than did, before high speed anything, I joined near-fledgling AOL. I spent hours in the evening exploring the new world laid before me. It started as news and information gathering. One day, I tried this new thing called MSN. They had these chat rooms for Lesbians and Bi-Sexuals. To join, you had to call a phone number to verify your authenticity. Wild, huh? I got in. I went to the chat room. There was this woman causing a ruckus with her more than rebellious poking of fellow chatters.I private messaged her after a few days of watching her stir things up (in a respectful, yet obviously philosophically divergent way). She answered back. We started discussing things like poetry and feminism. We started to get to know one another. Over the course of several months of chatting sometimes until 3 am, we spoke on the phone. This was a time when I’d never heard of anyone who met someone this way. She got me. I got her. The intellectual exchange had my brain on fire! Then came more phone calls. Then came discussions of whether we’d meet. I found her totally captivating and had no idea what she looked like, but that whole “straight” thing loomed perilously over us. It became clear at some point that our virtual friendship had become something much more to us both.Eight months from the first time we chatted, I found myself on a plane headed for Chicago—despite my misgivings about what I may be entering into. It was a short flight, as I also lived in the Midwest at the time. The night before I was to fly, she finally sent me a picture—one 10 years old. The plane arrived and I looked across the crowd. There she was, standing, with all the attitude I’d come to love over the past few months, leaning with one leg up against the wall, looking very cool. There was no doubt this was her and she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

On the second visit, somewhere along the course of the evening I had the strangest sensation. We were standing there talking, in a loud place, and suddenly everything went quiet. No one around me seemed to be moving except her and me. It was as though time itself had stood still. I looked at her then and knew I was in love for the first time in my life. And, she loved me. For a time, we were wrapped up safely in our love.

I wish I could say it had the type of ending I think we’d both hoped for at the outset, but it didn’t. I thought about her recently and found her MySpace page—she’s doing well and is happy in her life with another woman. Because I will always love her, that made me smile.

The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end. ~ Benjamin Disraelivisit Lori at Hahn at Home