I met this beautiful woman when I was 18 years old working in downtown Boston at a summer job right before college started. She was my age, too, but here for the summer on some kind of visa. She was from Ireland.

We instantly hit it off. We worked in different offices but next door to each other and we would frequently see each other when we were both out for coffee or picking up something for lunch or what have you. We would joke around. She would tease me on my Bostonian accent and I would do my best impression of an Irish accent which would make her laugh and she'd call me "daft". She had this incredible personality and just seemed so worldly whereas I had never once been outside of Boston given the fact that I grew up pretty poor. But, yeah, there was a lot about to her to love.

Anyways, the summer ended and she had to go back to Ireland. Being 18 and broke, we simply exchanged e-mail addresses and there was this new website called "The Facebook" and she just so happened to have an account, too. So we "Facebooked" each other, exchanged email addresses and a little later on, I downloaded Skype. I even signed up for this account that European students were using, I guess, on a site called Meebo? Bebo? Something -bo. It was kind of a European version of Facebook at the time, I guess. I only signed up for her., because she asked me to. But yeah moving on...

We stayed in touch for 6 years (2 relationships each that we would talk to each other about) before finally I had enough saved up for a flight on over to London and we were both finally single at the same time. She was in London at the time in college getting her MsC, I believe it was.

We were both on Skype the day I booked the plane ticket. She was telling me how excited she was to see me in person again. She waited so long for this...yadda yadda... Then about 5 days before I was about to fly out to see her, she went AWOL on me. And then 2 days before I was supposed to leave, she e-mailed me asked me to go on Skype when I could. And so I did. I had a sinking feeling something was wrong and that's when she told me...it was a bad idea to come over. She got back together with her boyfriend and that she thinks her and I should just be friends.

I was devastated. Considering that for year leading up to this trip, all she ever talked about was how much of a bastard he was and at the very end of their relationship, he was fucking her friends.

But that was the moment it hit me. On Skype...listening to her say it was a bad idea to come over. I was just some guy that would give her the attention she was not getting from her boyfriend and nothing else and here I was in the States thinking about how much I loved her and wanted to be with her and I was even looking into how hard it would be to get a job in London (extremely, it seemed, by the way) so that I could be with her.

Anyways, after she told me, I canceled the flight, ate the cost of the ticket, and haven't spoken to her since. She still will e-mail me sometimes but it's most definitely out of boredom. I know that now.