A few readers have asked for the story of how my wife and I met. We’ve discussed aspects of it here and in interviews with legitimate websites/journalists (unlike the site you are now on). But it all started with the Internet.

So let’s travel back in time, shall we?

The year was 1993 and I started going on America Online. Floppy disks were loaded. I was able to communicate to people around the world. Sure, most of them were already trying to game sex out of each other, but I adapted quickly and successfully stayed out of the clutches of strangers.

This is the first picture my wife sent ever me. Halloween!

I made friends with people based solely on their conversational skills, the meager profiles that represented their invented identities and, in a handful of instances, knowing friends of friends. Chatrooms were a desperate place. We didn’t have the multimedia support of images, videos and tagging to piece together identities like we do now. It was “A/S/L” and “pic?” to sculpt a human being out of digital code.

I have a love/hate relationship with the term “early adopter” but it’s awkwardly boastful and correct in this instance. Simultaneously. But I felt like a pioneer in a way. I totally almost got dysentery one time.

One day, in 1997, I logged on to my silly AOL account and a friend was there. I asked him what he was doing and he replied that he was in a self-made chatroom with a few of his real-life friends, so I joined in. I did my usual check of each person’s profile. I remember this one girl had a really insightful, distinctive quote and an intriguing screenname. Unlike our current accounts. “Avarneea.” When I first saw it, I thought ‘what kind of name is that anyway?” It sounded like a faraway place from a book I’d read as a child. We got along amazingly well, better than any cyber dialogue could go. She had a knack for typing like I imagined she spoke in person. Her presence transcended internet protocols. We shared advice, after becoming fast friends, but it was always platonic.

The conversation above never happened. But it should have.

We spoke for two years after that. Always in words on a screen. Never on the phone. We barely sent photos of each other. Then, one day she disappeared.

But that was online friendships. A person could vanish and you had very little with which to anchor yourself. The anonymity of the Internet meant there was no vernacular for real life contexts, if you didn’t want them to exist. There wasn’t a mainstream Facebook, Myspace, Friendster to ground a person, somehow, into the physical world. We asked for screennames instead of “friending.”

I was in a relationship with a girl for a couple years until that went down in flames around mid-April of 2000. Good thing I have some phoenix feathers in my DNA, because that was some bullshit. I made attempts at putting the pieces of my life back together. It was one of those life-altering and course-correcting experiences that culminates in realizing who your friends are, how afraid you’ve been to take that leap toward your dreams and getting down to the purpose of defining who you want to be. In other words, I was a mess.

As I was figuring out my next steps on warm spring day, a little screenname appeared in my instant messenger. It was that magical personality I’d met earlier. Avarneea. I came to learn the screename was a nickname based she’d been given. Her actual name was Avara. I’d never, in my life, heard that word as a name before. She told me her mother made it up out of thin air. Sure, it means different things in different languages as she would come to find out, but it came to her mother in a flash. She named all of her children that way. Her mother referred to it as “letting the kids name themselves.” She took cues from her children about what she thought they wanted to be named. Hippie? Yep.

I came to find out Avara moved to Los Angeles just as I was in the middle of making my plans to move there. All roads lead to LA. And also out of it, in case you were wondering. She mentioned in an instant message that maybe we could finally meet! I didn’t see any reason why not and I wanted to investigate places to live as well as jobs I could potentially dupe someone into hiring me for. But more than anything, I just wanted to meet a person I felt was a kindred spirit in so many ways.

But something strange happened.

Continue to PART 2