fakediary

After months of talking online, we finally decided it was time to meet in person.

It was a strange decision, considering how much we already knew about each other. We had shared stories we had never told anyone else, confessed things we weren’t particularly proud of, and spent countless nights picking apart our childhoods in an attempt to understand why we were the way we were.

And yet, we had never so much as sat across from each other at a coffee shop.

There was something almost absurd about it. I knew how David thought, what frightened him, what made him angry, and which memories still kept him awake at night. But I didn’t know how he walked, whether he talked with his hands, or what his face looked like when he laughed without a camera pointed at him.

I knew the complicated parts of him before I knew the ordinary ones.

We decided on New York.

It seemed like a reasonable compromise. He would fly in from Chile, and I would come from Japan. Neither of us would be visiting the other’s world. Instead, we would meet somewhere in between, in a city where we could briefly pretend that geography had never been an obstacle.

Besides, New York was familiar territory to me. I had lived there before, and the thought of returning with David gave the city a peculiar new significance.

Planning the trip was surprisingly easy. Perhaps because we had already spent so much time imagining a future together, arranging a few days in the same city seemed almost trivial by comparison.

We booked our flights, compared arrival times, and discussed where we would stay. David was excited, of course. He had a way of approaching things with a confidence that made even the most uncertain situations seem manageable.

I was excited too, although my excitement came with a fair amount of anxiety.

What if we didn’t get along in person?

It seemed like a ridiculous concern after everything we had been through together. But the internet allows us a certain degree of control over how we present ourselves. We can pause before answering, choose our words carefully, and retreat into silence whenever we need to.

In person, there would be no convenient little screen separating us from the awkwardness of being human.

What if our conversations didn’t flow as naturally? What if the chemistry we had cultivated over thousands of messages simply failed to translate into real life?

Or worse, what if we discovered that we liked the idea of each other more than the actual person?

I didn’t share all these concerns with David. Not because I was afraid to, but because I suspected he would respond with his usual optimism, and I wasn’t particularly interested in having my perfectly reasonable anxieties dismantled one by one.

So I packed my suitcase instead.

On the day of my departure, I found myself sitting at the airport in Japan, staring at the boarding pass on my phone.

Tokyo to New York.

It was a route I knew well enough, but this time felt different.

Somewhere on the other side of the world, David was preparing for his own journey. Two people who had spent months existing as voices, messages, and pixels on a screen were about to become real to each other in an entirely different way.

During the flight, I tried to imagine our first meeting.

Would we hug immediately? Would there be an awkward moment of hesitation? Would I recognize him instantly in a crowd, or would I walk right past the person who had become such a familiar part of my life?

I laughed quietly at the thought.

For someone who had spent so much time studying human behavior, I was remarkably unprepared to participate in it.

Hours later, as the plane began its descent toward New York, I looked out the window at the city stretching beneath us.

I had always associated New York with a particular version of myself. Someone younger, more ambitious, and perhaps a little more convinced that life would eventually make sense if I worked hard enough.

Now I was returning to meet a man from Chile whom I had gotten to know through conversations about childhood trauma and personality theories.

Life had an interesting sense of humor.

By the time I landed, David had already sent me several messages.

He wanted to know whether my flight had arrived, whether I had slept, and how long it would take me to get through immigration.

I answered his questions while making my way through the airport, dragging my suitcase behind me.

Then came the message that made everything suddenly feel real.

I’m here.

I stopped walking for a moment.

For months, David had existed somewhere far away, safely contained within the familiar boundaries of my phone. And now, for the first time, he was only a few minutes away.

I looked down at his message again.

Three simple words.

It occurred to me that we had spent so much time discussing who we were, who we had been, and who we hoped to become, that we had somehow overlooked the most ordinary part of getting to know someone.

Actually meeting them.

I took a breath, adjusted the strap of my bag, and started walking toward the arrivals hall.

Whatever happened next, at least we would finally have something to talk about that neither of us could analyze beforehand.