Posted 8:32 PM by Anonymous

I was sixteen when I discovered intelligent conversation. I was living in India at the time and had been online for a month before running into a boy that lived in the southern part of the country. Before either one of us knew it, we were exchanging 13k e-mails on a daily basis. I would ask him questions and he would offer thoughtful answers and stories and opinions that made me ask him for more. English was his first language, he had a vast vocabulary and a sharp mind, and his writing was solid and easy to follow. I didn't realize how much I craved a mind like his--a mind that would pick up something and look at it from all possible angles and even the impossible ones. Before that, conversation, even ones that lasted well into the morning, were about superficial, inconsequential things like movies and school and people. Never ideas.

Wookie--my nickname for the aforementioned boy, picked after he had convinced me to read Richard Bach's The Bridge Across Forever--was the closest thing to a soulmate I had found at that point. He interested me, challenged me, fascinated me, intrigued me, helped me explore and develop my ideas and challenged them constantly so I had to rethink them, finding more possibilities and learning more about myself than I ever had. He was the first Indian boy I could really talk to, and I think the only reason I didn't think about it was because we'd met online and he wrote English so well. When we spoke on the phone for the first time I was taken back by his heavy accent and he with my lack of one. We couldn't even talk. We had nothing of any use to say to each other. This was someone who wrote me ten-page letters, with writing on both sides, but who I could not actually talk to.

We started with e-mail and then he moved away to college, where he had no Internet access, so we wrote lengthy letters to each other every week. Longer and longer each letter would be, thicker envelopes had to be bought to accomodate the thickness of the letters. His words weren't beautiful. He didn't do frills. His writing was clean and direct, much like he was. I still have every letter he ever sent me. For Valentine's he drew me three pictures--the first with a hand reaching out, the second with another hand reaching back, and the third with a hand curled. It said something about reaching out for what you want or risk losing it forever. He said I had taught him that.

You don't realize just how important someone is until you risk losing them. I had to move back home and we knew that letters would take longer to get to each other and Internet access was unpredictable so we knew things would change. We knew we were going to lose each other. Things became more intense. E-mails were exchanged constantly. Feelings were questioned. Did I love him? Did he love me? Was I falling in love? Was he? He admitted to me that he was falling in love with me, but that he couldn't afford to just then. I understood. We found in each other someone we could talk to, someone we could learn from, someone who would allow our minds to become everything they could be. We were so good for each other's minds, I think. And sometimes I believe we were good for each other's hearts. I remember one night when Casablanca aired on cable and since neither one of us had watched it, we planned to watch it at the same time from different parts of the country. The line, "I fell in love with you in Casablanca" has a special meaning to me.

It was after Wookie that I realized I crave intelligence. I crave a mind that works and I need for that mind to competently express itself in English. I speak two other languages, but I think in English and I write in English and I love English. I need someone that shares my love for the language. I need someone who can spell, who can write grammatically correct sentences, and who knows the difference between "your" and "you're." I need someone that can read my entries or stories or letters, and understand me without the use of a dictionary. Even if English is not their first language, I need someone that knows it well enough to hear me when I'm speaking very, very fast and when I can barely put the words together. My best friend oftens says that I'm attracted to farangs--the Thai slang for Caucasians--and she's almost right. I'm attracted to people whose first language is English and who do not have the conservative strings that come with a lot of Asians here. It has to be noted that I did not grow up a conventional Indian woman and there is no way I can be with someone that isn't open-minded about my sexuality, my religion, and the way my heart beats.