The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal

The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - The Loveliest Five Decades

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April 24th, 2008

10:21 am

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The Loveliest Five Decades
Dear

zoethe,

Thirteen years ago, I was living in the loneliest place in my entire life. I'd moved away to Michigan to take a job that wasn't quite panning out for me, having left my family and friends behind. I was from New England, which meant that I was happy to talk once I was introduced as a friend, but after six months I still hadn't gotten the knack of forming the words, "So do you wanna go out for drinks after work?" So I had zero friends except for my girlfriend, who also had zero friends because she'd moved out to be with me...

And honestly, we were rubbing a little thin on each other.

Bored one night, I took my modem for a spin, putting in the 3.5" sampler disc to load the CompuServe forum software. I hopped online, went to the chat rooms, and found the Star Wars forum. And suddenly, I was home.

The first argument I got into was an extensive debate on how dumb the trench run in the first movie was, because why the hell did they take this suicidally long path down the heavily-defended center of the equator, spending twenty minutes flying through a killing tube of death? As I'd always thought, someone was arguing that they could have skimmed in five hundred yards away from the exhaust port, unloaded in a jiffy, and jetted off home.

It was dumb arguments like this that saved me. I wasn't sure how to make the transition from "work" to "real friend," and I never have been, but Star Wars was something I could do. So I got into huge debates on the meaningful details of the books, the movies, Lucas himself....

...and you were there.

The thing is, you and I could never just argue about Star Wars. Somehow, when we talked, no matter how we tried to keep it to science fiction we invariably spread out to touch such other disparate topics as religion, politics, abortion, and other bits. And we almost always disagreed. Our politics were incredibly different, so we went at each other hammer and tongs - dissecting each other's approaches with a scalpel and then bashing them into bits.

We spent so much time going head-to-head about world events that eventually, the moderators started moving us off the Star Wars forums. And to keep it there, we had to start adding in Promenade Protection Lines to ensure that they didn't move us - "Like the arid surface of Luke's home planet Tattooine, the Middle East is also a resource-poor environment with one thing propping up its economy..."

You never held back. I loved you for that. If I was wrong, you'd blast me. If I got a fact in error, you'd always call me on it. I considered you one of my best online friends because dammit, you were the most honest and perceptive person I knew.

And we did that for three years.

Eventually, my girlfriend left me to go back home to Connecticut - but by then, I had thankfully managed to pick up some good friends, so I finally had some actual physical people to talk to. I dated around for a bit, finding people I rather liked, and had a good life.... But I still went to the Star Wars forums every night before I went to bed because that's where my other friends were. I had two separate lives, with two separate bits of gossip, and they were very separated.

Then I got the email. You were in the process of divorcing your husband, and someone let on that you were starting to see other people. In fact, you'd been flirting heavily with one of the other members of the forum. And suddenly, I had a realization. I shot off an email to you at 11:00 at night, the words flying off my fingers before I could stop them:

Dear Gini,

Don't you realize the reason I've never flirted with you once is because I've always been half a heartbeat away from falling in love with you?

Oh, I couldn't sleep that night. Because it was true. You'd noticed that I never took any attempts at an innuendo, never signed off a post with *hugs*, never did anything affectionate online. You'd told me that I seemed distant sometimes. But though I didn't even know what you looked like - I'd never seen a picture - you had a brain that was something so compelling that dammit, I was furious that I never thought that hey, we were both either single or on our way to be, maybe I should explore that.

I kept refreshing the screen, because maybe I'd made a mistake. Maybe I'd just crossed the line and lost a friend by skeezing her out. Maybe I'd shared too much. I tried to relax, but I had to know what your response was - and your was on Alaskan time, so you were four hours behind me. I kept clicking in a frenzy of terror, hoping that I hadn't blown it.

And the response I got back was purest Gini:

Dear Ferrett,

I'm flattered. I've always been the biggest member of your fan club. But before we continue, I have to ask a vital question:

Are you drunk?

I wasn't. I was serious. And so were you. And we started talking about things.

It wasn't easy. We had distance to cover, and flying out to Alaska wasn't cheap. And we weren't committing to marriage, just a strange form of e-dating and attraction, which is heartbreaking. I burned for you all the time. We spent endless hours on ICQ, chatting into the night, trying to get by on different times and different lives. And eventually, after only a handful of visits, I knew:

I wanted to marry you.

The concept had always seemed like a press-gang chain before, some restriction - I'd had the traditional male yok of, "Oh, I don't wanna settle down" - but once I'd found the woman I wanted to be with for the rest of my life, suddenly "getting married" couldn't happen quickly enough. I asked. You accepted, even though you told me it was goddamned looney. How the hell were we gonna get together with your two kids with a life in Alaska and my career in Michigan?

The answer, of course, was that I'd have to move to Alaska. You had a life, and it was more entrenched than mine. And I'd uproot everything once again to be with you. So I left a good job, right after I'd just spent four years assembling a social life to go to another place where once again, the only person I'd really know would be the woman I lived with.

It wasn't easy at first. You know that. Online life isn't real life, and there were a lot of buried issues - my raging and blind insecurity, your secretiveness - that never surfaced over the wires. We argued a lot. We went, once again, hammer and tongs, except this time it wasn't fun. And after eighteen months, the spectre of divorce got raised, but there was one thing that kept us together:

We liked each other. We always did. We might not have been sure about the marriage, but we didn't want to tank the friendship.

That saved us.

We moved back to the states, to Ohio, and settled out the last of our bumps. And the amazing thing is that it's gotten better every year. I can't imagine life without you. I can't imagine how much lessened my life would be if I hadn't sent that email, and I remain amazed that someone as wonderful as you said "yes" to me.

I'm more in love with you than ever. You're my friend, my lover, the woman who I admire most, and yes. I am the biggest member of your fan club, and always have been. But you knew that.

And today? You turn fifty. You're still as lovely as ever to me, and still as amazing, and I'm just so fucking glad that people like you exist on this planet.

Unfortunately, this year at Penguicon I wanted to give you a special present: I wanted to break a larger present up into twenty golden eggs, then hand them to people we knew at the convention to have them hand them to you whenever they saw fit. I wanted the world to just be mystical for you that weekend, where strangers and friends alike would give you parts of a larger whole that would assemble into something grand and wonderful... But I couldn't think of what I could break up into twenty parts to fit in twenty eggs. And so that moment passed.

All I can do to make it somewhat special is to tell you that I love you. Which I do. And to wish you the hope that the next fifty years are even better, and that every day I wake up and go, "Christ, I'm going to spend the rest of my life with this woman. This woman I met in a forum. Who still argues and fights with me on a daily basis."

I love you, sweetie. Happy birthday.

- T.F.

(Tell me I'm full of it)

Comments

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From:	bart_calendar
Date:	April 24th, 2008 02:24 pm (UTC)

(Link)

That is fucking awesome.

Happy Birthday to zoethe!

*sigh*

Re: *sigh*

sigh

Re: sigh