The Intimacy of Strangers, Part I

Remember in You've Got Mail when Meg Ryan goes to check her email after getting stood up and her mailbox flashes empty? That's how I feel right now. Not that I got stood up or that I'm Meg Ryan but that feeling of utter despair that perhaps one little email, one red flag in the inbox would fix everything, at least for a moment.

And it doesn't because loneliness is an exhaustive isolation. I care too much. I love too much. And I feel like I got tricked. Tricked into thinking that pain as an adult is different. Tricked into thinking that care and love were only children's games and that I could play them.

In retrospect, I realize it was summer camp. It was everything great I remember camp being--working hard, playing hard, loving people you don't know and connecting in some surreal way that just doesn't make sense. Sure we weren't in bunk beds eight to a room, but we may as well have been.

I think this might be what heaven is like. A little bit, anyway and without the hangover.

You learn to know someone so quickly. First they're perfect and then they're flawed and somewhere, in the middle, you've fallen in love. Fallen in love with people you hardly know and yet, feel like you always have and always will know each other. I'll remember the way she laughed and how he always had that camera and her love of children. And I'll remember that he went to the bathroom everywhere we went and that time when I thought I couldn't last another week and that maybe I should just quit this new life.

And it's over. I made the last week just like I made the first week. And I think the second week is when I fell in love. In love with strangers.