Bittersweet

Like all things significant it all started innocently enough with a first time foray into the realm of the internet chat rooms. Some twist of fate or perhaps coincidence, they met in the virtual world, two people fighting boredom and looking for something they felt they needed but did not know what.

From the very beginning their conversations had pizazz and more than a little excitement. A mysterious connection had been randomly and magically made and their digital talk hummed and sizzled with the fervor of two souls finding each other's mate across the virtual void.

She asked for his mobile phone number and to his surprise he gave it to her, something he thought he would never do for a stranger he has never met. The die was cast and they began texting each other, more frequently as the weeks passed.

She was persistent and relentless. He was hesitant, cautious and unsure. And for many months they grappled and groped, trying to know and feel each other out. Then as one year ended and a new one began, the ice broke. She called him finally and and when she did some mystical bond between them began to weave its magic.

He called back after a week's time and from SMS messages they graduated to phone calls and eventually to video chats back on the internet. They finally saw each other and while gazing at each other's digital images, they dreamed dreams and talk of the future.

But fate may soon deal both of them a heavy blow. Circumstances have developed that will see her leaving these sunny shores for the uncertainties of a foreign land. She sees no choice but to make plans to go and he, despite his reservations and fears of losing her, accepts the hard realities of the path she has chosen for herself.

So they stand trying to hold each other's hand in the edge of this limbo of undefined dreams, unsure of tomorrow and desperately holding to the promise of the present. The future is a quagmire of doubts and the intrusions of a cold and unsympathetic universe seek to undermine the tenuous and gossamer links that bind them together.

But hope, they say, springs eternal from the human breast and need to be complete in each other's company drives them on the bittersweet end of it all.

Perhaps there is a place and time for their loving and it is in the here and now. For such things are the stuff of dreams and what is life without the dreaming. Such a thing of beauty, for what they have is indeed beautiful and precious, deserves to live, survive and grow.

All it needs is a chance to be.