And ten months later . . .

Hello again imaginary friends! No, I'm not dead, just been busy and distracted and such. When last I wrote I mentioned that I was going to meet up with my online boyfriend for the first time, and that trip was amazing, the best spring break of my life. I'm serious, it's amazing how well he and I get along, it's like I lucked into my own personal fairytale. And since I'm all about the anonymity, we'll give my real-life handsome prince the code name Charming. Because he is, Charming is just too sweet, he's the most amazing man that I've ever met, that I could have ever dreamed up. He's clever, goofy, kind, he's got a huge heart and we have everything in common. He's everything that I ever could have dreamed for in a partner, my best friend that I'm hopelessly in love with.

My mom and my shrink suggested that I take the summer off from school to, uh, decompress I guess would be a good word for it, so I ended up spending the summer down south with Charming and his family. Aside from being a bit hotter than I'm used to, it was an amazing summer. We got to spend so much time together, I got to know his parents and his sister's family a little better, and I got the fun of being Auntie to all his nieces and nephews. I love kids, and these kids are unnaturally cute, so that was a lot of fun. And best of all I got to spend each night falling asleep in Charming's arms. When summer did end and I headed back home, I wasn't quite prepared for how visceral the loss of his presence would be. Rationally I was certain that I'd be fine: we would still talk on Skype every day, and we were already making plans for him to move up north to join me this next spring, so I'd been so certain that while I'd miss snuggling with him, I'd be fine until we had a chance to see each other again. But as we said our goodbyes at the airport and the security line put more and more distance between us, I just felt this hollow ache well up in my chest. After four months of waking up every morning to his smiling face, I'd grown a little addicted to the warmth of his hugs, the smell of his shirts, the taste of his kisses. I managed to make it through a few months without him--our all day Skype conversations help quite a bit with that--and just recently got back from visiting him again for a week. My parents agreed to pay for my plane ticket as my christmas present. And now he and I are both pretty much counting down the time until he has thing arranged to allow him to move up here. Just a few more months, and then we'll never have to go though this withdrawal again. I know that Charming is only my first boyfriend, and that we've only been together for about 15 months, but we're both certain that we're in this for the distance. I can't imagine spending the rest of my life with anyone but him, and we both feel like lottery winners: against all odds and separated by 1000 miles, we somehow managed to find our soul mates.